FASIffQK SPINACH $2.75 ''Eat your broccoli, dear." "/ say it's spinach — and I say to hell with it." — from a cartoon in the New Yorker Fashion Is Spinach By ELIZABETH HAWES ELIZABETH HAWES is one of the best-known and most successful designers of smart women's clothes in America, and the undisputed leader of the small group of American designers who have challenged the style supremacy of Paris. Miss Hawes' story is an adventure into every phase of the women's clothing industry, the sec- ond largest business in the United States. Her early struggles for recognition and her final lead- ership in helping to shift the center of the fashion industry from Paris to New York make a story that will appeal not only to the initiate, but to thousands besides — and to their husbands. SOME OPINIONS "Consumers attention! Elizabeth Hawes tells us that 'the deformed thief Fashion' steals the real value out of what we buy. She suggests a remedy. She makes a plea for functional and durable merchandise. Consumers want that too. "Although Fashion Is Spinach deals exclusively with the clothing industry it has a wider application." — ALINE DAVIS HAYS President, League of Women Shoppers "There are few enough books written by people who know what they are talking about. And few enough of those few which either make sense or, making sense, have the wit to hold the reader's interest through even a short summer evening. But Hawes' book on fashion is one. It is fun to read, exciting to think about. . . . She is a fiery, human little David taking a shot at that fantastic Goliath which is the fashion world — and plunking it right in its dreamy eye." — RALPH INCERSOLL, publisher, TIME "All the dirt on female fashions which nobody ought to know and everybody is actually panting for. No man will sleep well of nights for a week after reading the inside continued on back flap From the collection of the 7 n m o PreTinger i a AJibrary San Francisco, California 2006 ijreunion <2xi QJpinacn H FASHION IS SPINACH lu Slizaiet/i RANDOM HOUSE • NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1938, BY ELIZABETH HAWES SECOND PRINTING DECORATIONS BY ALEXEY BRODOVITCH PRINTED IN U.S.A. BY H. WOLFF "Eat your broccoli, dear." 7 say it's spinach — and I say to hell with it." Illustration by courtety of Carl Rote & The New Yorker I acknowledge with gratitude the help Of Maria Leiper who asked for another book — Of Harriette McLain who enabled Random House to print this book — Of Kenneth White who believes in split infinitives — All of whom made it possible for me to dedicate Fashion Is Spinach TO MADELEINE VIONNET the great creator of style in France AND TO THE FUTURE DESIGNERS OF MASS-PRODUCED CLOTHES the world over ontents PART I THE FRENCH LEGEND "All beautiful clothes are made in the houses of the French couturieres and all women want them" Chapter 1 The Deformed Thief, Fashion 3 2 "Is God French?" , 13 3 I Was Nurtured in It 25 4 Copying, a Fancy Name 35 5 The Photographic Eye 49 6 NEWS . . . News . . . news 65 7 The Bastard Art of Styling 79 ix Chapter 8 Cutting, Pinning and Draping 95 9 It Creaks 105 PART II BUY AMERICAN "All American women can have beautiful clothes." Chapter 10 The Great American Boast 119 11 Couturiere, Pocket Edition 133 12 Designers Are Not Miracle Makers 145 13 "She's Barred from France" 155 14 Robots, Maybe 177 15 Up for Promotion 189 16 Bigger Than U. S. Steel 203 17 Fords, Not Lincolns 215 18 I Buy an Ivory Tower 225 19 Notatal Silk 245 20 Blood Money and No Money 263 21 A Lucky Strike 277 22 Men Might Like Skirts 291 23 Our Competitive System 313 24 I Say It's Spinach 331 PART I THE FRENCH LEGEND "All beautiful clothes are made in the houses of the French Couturieres and all women want them" <_y ne c_x nief, THERE are only two kinds of women in the world of clothing. One buys her clothes made-to-order, the other buys her clothes ready-made. The made-to-order lady frequents Molyneux, Lanvin, Paquin, Chanel, in Paris. In New York she is deposited by 3 her chauffeur "on the Plaza," at the door of Bergdorf Good- man, or she threads through the traffic of Forty-ninth Street to Hattie Carnegie, less advantageously placed geographically but equally important where fashion is concerned. She may do her shopping out of the traffic, in a gray house on Sixty- seventh Street, Hawes, Inc., or just hit the edge of the mob at the Savoy-Plaza where Valentina holds sway. In any case, the made-to-order lady can shop and dress to her entire satisfaction. Thousands of skilled craftsmen and women are ready to sew up her clothes. Tens of design- ers in London and Paris and New York and Los Angeles will work out her special sketches. Hundreds of salespeople are on tap at all hours of the day to watch over her fittings, ad- vise her what not to buy, send shoppers to find that special color and material which really should be worn in her dining room. She pays, yes. But it's worth it a thousand times. Her clothes are her own and correspond to her life as she under- stands it. She may spend hours fitting them, but in the end they are right. Meanwhile, the ready-made lady shops. She too may want a special color to wear in her dining room. She may find that color after two weeks of hunting, or she may never find it, since very possibly "we are not using it this season." She may find a really warm and sturdy winter coat which will last her for the next six years and only cost $35 — or she may discover that the coat she bought last year is not in fashion this year, that the material was, after all, not all wool. Millions and millions of women go shopping year after year. They are tall and short, fat and thin, gay and de- pressed. They may clothe their bodies for the simple pur- pose of keeping warm or not going naked. They may choose 4 their wardrobes with care for wintering in Palm Beach, or going to the races in Ascot. Their first necessary choice is, can they pay enough to get exactly what they want or are they at the mercy of mass production. Can they buy style — or must they buy fashion? Lanvin and Chanel, Hawes and Valentina, are funda- mentally occupied with selling style. The manufacturer and the department store are primarily occupied with selling fashion. I don't know when the word fashion came into being, but it was an evil day. For thousands of years people got along with something called style and maybe, in another thousand, we'll go back to it. Style is that thing which, being looked back upon after a century, gives you the fundamental feeling of a certain period in history. Style in Greece in 2000 B.C. was delicate outdoor architecture and the clothes which went with it. Style in the Renaissance was an elaborately carved stone cathedral and rich velvet, gold trimmed robes. Style doesn't change every month or every year. It only changes as often as there is a real change in the point of view and lives of the people for whom it is produced. Style in 1937 may give you a functional house and comfortable clothes to wear in it. Style doesn't give a whoop whether your comfortable clothes are red or yellow or blue, or whether your bag matches your shoes. Style gives you shorts for tennis because they are practical. Style takes away the wasp-waisted corset when women get free and active. If you are in a position to deal with a shop which makes your clothes specially for you, style is what you can have, the right clothes for your life in your epoch, uncompromis- ingly, at once. On top of style there has arisen a strange and wonderful creature called fashion. He got started at least as far back as the seventeenth century when a few smart people recog- nized him for what he was and is. "See'st thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is?" Mr. Shakespeare demanded in Much Ado About Nothing. But nobody paid any attention. Now we have the advertising agency and the manufac- turer, the department store and the fashion writer all here to tell us that the past, present, and future of clothing de- pends on fashion, ceaselessly changing. Manufacturing clothes is the second largest business in the United States. Not one-half of one percent of the popu- lation can have its clothing made to order — or wants to for that matter. This means that a large portion of $2,656,242,000 changes hands annually under the eye of that thief, fashion, who becomes more and more deformed with practice. Fashion is a parasite on style. Without style, he wouldn't exist, but what he does to it is nobody's business. Fashion is that horrid little man with an evil eye who tells you that your last winter's coat may be in perfect physi- cal condition, but you can't wear it. You can't wear it because it has a belt and this year "we are not showing belts." Fashion gets up those perfectly ghastly ideas, such as ac- cessories should match, and proceeds to give you shoes, gloves, bag, and hat all in the same hideous shade of kelly green which he insists is chic this season whether it turns you yellow or not. Fashion is apt to insist one year that you are nobody if you wear flat heels, and then turn right around and throw thousands of them in your face. Fashion persuades millions of women that comfort and good lines are not all they should ask in clothes. Fashion swings the female population this way and that through the 6 magic expression that "they" are wearing such and such this season and you must do likewise or be ostracized. Fashion in America says that if Lady Abbington is wear- ing lace to the races, you should wear it to work in Macy's basement because you are afterwards going on to Coney Island. If "they" are wearing their hair cut close to their heads and waved over one eye, then you must, too. If you can't go to the hairdresser every day, that's just too bad. One of the most fascinating things about the world of fashion is that practically no one knows who inhabits it or why it exists. There are a few people who know how it works, but they won't tell. So it just goes on, getting in deeper and deeper, until something like a war or depression slows it up from time to time. But once the war or the depression lets up, off again goes fashion on its mad way. Some people seem to like it. There are a good many people who don't, but just accept it as inevitable, throwing away perfectly good old clothes and buying new ones every year. Now and then the public gets angry and writes letters to the press saying they simply won't wear long skirts, or short ones, as the case may be, but "they" pay very little attention. "They" just go ahead and change the fashion again and say you can't have blue or you must have brown. "They" decide everything. "They" know whether it is to be pink or green this fall, whether it's to be short skirts, whether you can wear mink. For years everyone who thinks has gone around at one time or another trying to find out in a desultory sort of way who "they" are. If they have any sense of humor, they must have a great deal of fun. Fancy how they must have laughed when they once got the last New York shop girl into afternoon clothes in the morning. One of their best stunts was putting all the 7 ladies into Eugenie hats one September, and then whipping them off when all those old feathers had been sold. In the past they were able to decree that all Fifth Avenue was to be purple in a given week. If you didn't get a purple dress in those days, you were jailed. They got by so well with the color changes that a revulsion occurred in the pub- lic mind, and for a number of years they haven't really suc- ceeded in putting across a solid wave of a single color. They take inordinate pleasure in telling you your acces- sories must match and then putting out seven different shades of brown so you can spend two weeks finding the brown shoe that happens to go with your brown coat. They also love to take up "influences." Sometimes it's Chinese, other times Mexican. The game those seasons is to try and find the in- fluence in anything but print. Then, they improve things. The sight of a simple towel- ing bathrobe infuriates them. They put navy blue stars on it at once. Just as you resign yourself to the navy blue stars, they throw away that pattern and make all the toweling bath- robes with puffed sleeves. The same group took away all those lovely white bath- rooms and made them lavender, and have got out streamline gas stoves. They no sooner taught everyone to go out in low shoes and silk stockings in winter than they decided to try out high shoes again. There have been rumors about that "they" are people like Greta Garbo, and Mrs. Harrison Williams, exotic the- atrical stars and rich society ladies. But nobody can prove it. Greta Garbo is reported to wear whatever her designer chooses to put on her and it is exceedingly doubtful that she really expected everyone to wear sequin day dresses a la Mata Hari. Mrs. Harrison Williams always appears to be having a 8 very good time in public and to be largely taken up with talking to her dinner partner. Possibly she lies awake nights worrying whether to turn all the world into a chiffon evening dress — or thinking up the newest color for next spring. Are "they" really the French designers? At a large meet- ing of New York business women in fashion, Lucien Lelong was answering questions. "Monsieur Lelong," a lady begged, "please tell us what colors will be smart next spring?" Mon- sieur Lelong politely replied, "I have a hundred shades of blue, a hundred shades of red, and so on. When I design a new collection, I just put my hand on the samples and take anyone that suits my fancy that day." Patou, when he was alive and successful around 1932, got out a whole collection of long-waisted dresses. Nobody else followed suit. Nobody bought them. He had to make an- other collection with natural waists. There are the dress manufacturers on our Seventh Ave- nue in New York. Some say they are "they." Some say those manufacturers just brutally decide they will put the waist- lines up or down as suits their fancy. How did it happen then, in 1930, that the manufacturers on Seventh Avenue made a whole set of clothes with short skirts and suddenly found the skirts had got long while they weren't looking? So, a king gets crowned in England and everything must have ermine trimming. But you can't find any ermine trim- ming in America that spring. I go to buy some oxfords with cuban heels — and find that they only come with one-inch heels. In 1929 leather-heeled oxfords were too heavy for any American woman to wear. That's what Delman's chic shoe shop said. By 1934, leather-heeled oxfords were all over the streets of New York. I want a navy blue dress in the fall. It is only worn in the spring, the salesgirl says. I want a coat with no fur trimming 9 in the winter of 1930. All winter coats have fur trimming, the salesgirl says. I want a brown turtle-necked sweater. I start at Macy's and slowly wend my way through Altman's and Best's and Lord and Taylor's and Saks' and Bonwit's. Finally I buy a white one at Fortnum and Mason and send it to be dyed. They say it won't dye, but it does. I want a plain knit bathing suit with a skirt. They're all fancy knits this year and they have no skirts. I want a bras- siere and separate pants bathing suit. We don't have them any more. That was last year. I want that kind of a bathing suit and I'm going right up and get one made to order by Valentina. I don't care if it does cost me $200. But if I haven't got the $200, must I take a printed challis bathing suit this year and like it? Just because they're wearing them on the Lido, what's that to me? Why don't they ask me, a ready-made lady, what I want? Maybe they'd find out, to their horror, that all I want is a nice deep-crowned riding hat like the one I had ten years ago. Why don't they find out how much money I have to spend and what I really want to buy for it? Who got up this idea that just because one tenth of one percent of the population needs a certain kind of clothes, I want the same thing? Who decided that just because I was only paying $10.75 for my dress I wanted a bow and a diamond clip added to the neck? Fashion, my girl — he decided. He doesn't deal directly with you. He swipes ideas from style, embroiders them to cover up the fact that he left out half the material and only paid 75 cents a yard for the rest. He hires press agents and advertising men to assure you that the bright cellophane wrapper is what counts. Fashion gets $50,000 a year for con- vincing you. His wife gets her clothes at Hattie Carnegie's, so why should he worry. 10 I, Elizabeth Hawes, have sold, stolen, and designed clothes in Paris. I have reported on Paris fashions for news- papers and magazines and department stores. I've worked with American buyers in Europe. In America, I have built up my ivory tower on Sixty- seventh Street in New York. There I enjoy the privilege of making beautiful and expensive clothes to order for those who can afford my wares. I ran the show myself from the business angle for its first four years. I have designed, sold, and publicized my own clothes for nine years. At the same time, in New York, I designed one year for a cheap wholesale dress house. I've designed bags, gloves, sweaters, hats, furs, and fabrics for manufacturers. I've worked on promotions of those articles with advertising agencies and department stores. During the course of all this, I've become convinced that ninety-five percent of the business of fashion is a useless waste of time and energy as far as the public is concerned. It serves only to ball up the ready-made customers and make their lives miserable. The only useful purpose that changes in fashion can possibly have is to give a little additional gaiety to life. But by the time you've taken off fashion's bright cellophane wrapper, you usually find not only that fashion is no fun at all, but that even the utility of your pur- chase has been sacrificed. Fashion is so shrouded in mystery, so far away and so foreign, so complicated, and so boring when you understand its ways, that it has become a complete anachronism in mod- ern life. One good laugh, and the deformed thief would van- ish into the past. All my laughs are based entirely on my own work. I have done no research on any of the aspects of fashion except what 11 was necessary to a given job. I simply write what I have ex- perienced— and none of the characters in this book are taken from anything but life. 12 "of, ff,J 3% AMERICA has a habit of priding herself on being a land of big time promotion and publicity. Most Americans engaged in it have never stopped to consider that the really big press agents of the world are the French. They have built something up which has lasted not for a week or a month or a season, but for nearly a century. 13 There have been a good many books written about the French, how they think they are God, or "Dieu est-il Frangais," but the beauty of the French clothing business is that for decades nobody ever questioned its God-like quality. The build-up has been so perfect, so subtle and so unceasing that a legend is still accepted as reality by nearly the whole world. One must give the French full credit for keeping their campaign on a very high level. They cannot be held respon- sible for what America has done to a once perfectly good idea. The French legend is a very simple one. All really beautiful clothes are designed in the houses of the French couturiers and all women want those clothes. Properly speaking, a couturier or couturiere, male or female of the species, is a person who creates clothes for in- dividual women and maintains an establishment where those designs are sold directly to women and made to order. All important couturiers show at least two collections of clothes a year, spring and summer clothes in February, autumn and winter clothes in August or September. Only the made-to-order lady goes to buy in such houses. She chooses the clothes she wants from a collection of seventy-five to two hundred dresses, coats, and suits of every description and for every occasion. The designs have been worked out and made on girls, mannequins, who afterward show them to the customers. The woman does not buy a de- sign made specially or exclusively for her. What she buys may be sold to many other women. In some cases, individual designs are worked out for a certain customer. This is rare, however, and usually only happens in the case of ceremonial clothes, weddings, corona- tions, theatrical performances. It is quite difficult for Americans who have never shopped 14 in Europe to understand that, while each couturier makes clothes for every hour of the day and night, he makes only what he chooses for each occasion. Every real designer has his or her own interpretation of the style of the era. If Chanel does not like black satin, nobody can get black satin from her. If Chanel does not like full skirts, nobody can find one chez Chanel. The customer who wants satin and full skirts will go, with Chanel's blessing, to another couturier who is using satin and making full skirts. Every European made-to-order shopper ultimately finds the couturier who suits her type and ideas. Sometimes a woman may go one place for her coats and suits, another for her evening clothes, but having finally settled on the designer or designers whose taste is most suitable, the made-to-order customer sticks. In general, nothing but death can separate the made-to-. order European woman from her chosen couturier. Her faith is based on the great tradition to which the Parisian cou- turiers belong. The names of the French designers as individuals may die out within a generation, but there are always new ones to replace them. So far the newcomers have adequately filled the places of their dying predecessors. In their comings and their goings, they continue to work in a single pattern. Their business is that of dressmaking, great dressmaking, design- ing in fine fabrics and sewing fine seams. The pattern estab- lished by the French designers is followed by all couturiers the world over. All that is necessary to be a French designer is that one work in France. This is a very important reason for the suc- cess of the great legend. The French believe in their souls that all dress designers are French, and work in Paris. They 15 make it easy to work in France, if you want to be a French designer. If you're Norman Hartnell, and want to show clothes in Paris but go right back to England and keep on designing there afterward, then you can't find a place in Paris to show your clothes. You just can't make a lease. If you're Elizabeth Hawes and some French fabric manu- facturers are being very helpful to you, even practically keeping you in business through a depression, you will be asked by those manufacturers over and over again, "Why do you insist on being an American Designer?" They always say, "Why don't you work in France? It's so much easier to work there." It is much easier to work there on individual clothes. Sometimes you wonder why you ever tried to work any place else. Everything is arranged for couturiers to work in Paris. So, among the French designers one finds Molyneux, who is French to the French, British to you. There is Schiaparelli, a great French designer, born Italian. There is Main Bocher, born in the U.S.A. And there are, of course, designers born and bred in France. When you design in Paris, you know that everyone un- derstands what you are trying to do and wants to help. That is, they understand what you're trying to do if you want to design beautiful clothes for the made-to-order European woman. To begin with, time is no object. Wages of sewing girls are low and you can put as much work into a dress as you like. The price will still be within reason. It may take a girl a hundred hours to finish a garment. In 1925, she was paid about $7.50 for her work. Even more important than the price of her labor, the Parisian midinette, the sewing girl of the great tradition, 16 knows her business. She has been trained to sew beautifully and carefully. She is thousands strong in number. Rent is fabulously low in the big city of artistic tradition. The mannequins who show the clothes depend more on their gentlemen friends than on the dressmakers for their living. The fabrics are wonderful and seductive in price as well as in design and color. The handicraft background provides handweavers as well as handsewers. Some of the peasants around Lyons, in central France, still bend over their very old and rickety handlooms to turn out small lengths of intricate damask. Machines could do it, yes. But no machine can work out the first bit of new design. Moreover, there is no necessity for having it done by machine. One day I suggested that some of those very de- sirable materials were too hideously expensive. "Couldn't you make them by machine?" I asked a French fabric man. I knew he could. They are sometimes made by machine in America, the design stolen from a hand-made pattern. "Oh," said the fabric gentleman, "they would never be so beautiful." He painted a pastoral picture of the peasant milking his cow between weaving inches of the damask in question. "Come on," said I, "you know perfectly well it can be done by machine." "Well," he smiled gently, "it's still cheaper to have them made by hand." The French standard of living for the working class has been notoriously low for generations. The generations which have made the great tradition of French fabrics and dress- making, the generations which have made possible the build- ing of the great tradition, were still quietly carrying on in 1925 when I went to work in Paris. 17 They carried on with the buckles and the buttons, the flowers and other odds and ends which go into fine dresses. Any time you want a special buckle in France, someone will run it up for you. They don't have to make a die and cast a thousand of them. One at a time, a yard at a time, a dress at a time, this is what is needed to carry on the great tradition. It is medieval, it is anachronistic, it is why all beautiful clothes are supposed to be made in France and all women are supposed to want them. The whole French clothing industry, from the materials down to the last button, is run for the purpose of dressing women individually, to order. The designers are not only bred to do that, but they are urged to do only that. The French have never tried very hard, or with any con- viction to make cheap clothes in mass production. They de- sign beautiful clothes for rich and beautiful women, and what the rest of the French population wears is of no impor- tance. It is not only of no importance to the French designer, it is of no importance to anyone in the fashion world. All those who have ever been in France know that the majority of women wear a tailored suit or a black dress and that's that. The entire French legend is built up on a few de- signers who design for a small group of a few hundred or possibly a few thousand women who are "chic." There is no word in English for chic. Why should there be? Everything chic is by legend French. Perhaps everything chic is in reality French. The French invented chic and they keep it alive by what has come to be a very complicated ma- chinery. It was not complicated when all women who wanted and could afford more clothing than enough to cover their bodies were the very rich and leisurely European popula- tion, plus a few ladies in the hinterland of America, Russia, 18 Argentina. It was not complicated before America swung into mass production. We try very hard to have chic in America, but the ground is not fertile. We tried to substitute an English word, "smart." R. H. Macy took it right into the heart of our cul- ture and decided it was "smart to be thrifty." That fixed that word. Nobody who knows anything about chic thinks you can have it and be thrifty. Nobody has ever seen a chic woman in thrifty $29.50 clothes. If you are chic, you have your hair done every day or two. Your nails are perfect. Your stockings scarcely last an evening. Your shoes are impeccable. Your jewelry is real and expensive. Your clothes are made to order and to fit. They are your clothes made in your colors and not one of a thousand machine-made copies. Your hats are your hats with the brims exactly the right width and bend. Chic is a combination of style and fashion. To be really chic, a woman must have positive style, a positive way of liv- ing and acting and looking which is her own. To this she adds those endless trips to the hairdresser, facial lady, shoemaker and dressmaker. With infallible taste for her own problems, she chooses what is in her style and fashionable at the same time. If her style is not quite the fashion, the chic woman ef- fects a compromise with the edge on the fashionable side. Being chic was not only created "on the Continent" but it fundamentally can only flourish in that unhurried atmos- phere. It takes a background of leisured people with secure bankrolls who don't have or want to worry about what's going on at the office, to produce chic and keep it alive. It takes large houses, in town and in country, with plenty of servants who run everything smoothly, without requiring too many orders. The chic woman must have a lady's maid who worries 19 over what her lady looks like even more than my lady does herself. It is the maid, Marie, who says, "Madame really must buy some new hats. The little black felt in particular, of which Madame is so fond, is becoming just a trifle stretched on the left edge where Madame pulls it down over her eye. And the navy tailleur! Really Madame cannot wear it again. There is just the merest shine on the back of the skirt. Madame's net evening dress has a small tear in the skirt. I have mended it, but Madame will only care to wear it at home in the future." Oh, to all the people who design and put together Ma- dame's clothes, her lady's maid is of vital importance. It is Marie who will tell Madame, "The clothes which you bought last season at Adrienne's, Madame. I think you will not want to go there this season, really. The seams split on the sleeves every time Madame wore one of them. The black lace was definitely some old stuff which broke on the first wear- ing. I feel sure Madame can find what she likes at Dolneau where the workmanship is so excellent. I have never, Ma- dame, had to repair one seam of a Dolneau frock." She has never, perhaps, had to repair one seam of a Dolneau frock. Even if she has, Dolneau has repaid her. Marie gets a cut on everything that Madame buys in Paris. It is the prerogative of the lady's maid to pay the bills. She puts on her neat navy coat and small blue felt hat. She pulls up her sturdy cotton stockings and slips in to her old black purse a bunch of thousand franc notes which Madame gives her for the Dolneau clothes. She scuttles silently up to a cer- tain desk in Dolneau's big house on the rue Royale. She hands over her high pile of franc notes. She receives back a little pile of franc notes, her pay-off for liking Dolneau clothes. Maybe he pays her 10% and Adrienne only gave her 5%. Adrienne's clothes immedi- 20 ately burst at the seams, the hems fall out of them, the mate- rials go into holes like magic. Madame will surely prefer to buy her clothes at Dolneau the next season. Madame needn't worry about whether she has enough silk stockings, whether her lingerie is about to give out, what she is going to wear to lunch today. Marie will purchase the stockings, at a very good price from which, even so, she will be given her commission. Marie will call in the lingerie woman some morning, when Madame has nothing to do be- tween twelve and one, so a new set can be ordered. Marie will make the important decision between the beige outfit with the olive green accessories and the simple black crepe with the very small white edgings in which Madame looks so very very chic. Madame's butler will run everything about the house so she never has to give it a thought. Madame's chauffeur will know by instinct the addresses where she wants to go to shop, for lunch, for the weekend. And the husband of Madame will have time to go week- ending with her. He will not be too busy to run off to the south of France when it gets a bit rainy in Paris. He will have time to notice every new bag and belt and shoe she wears. He will go shopping with her and have long consulta- tions with the saleslady. "Madame's little gray tailleur of last spring was just a trifle too young for her," Monsieur will say. "I think that these very short skirts are not becoming to Madame. We must choose something just the merest bit more serious- minded this season. Cherie, vraiment, you know perfectly well that your legs are just a touch plump. Of course, I adore them, but in public I think we should have them covered just two inches lower down." The hours consumed in getting just the right shoe to 21 complete each costume, and fitting that shoe and sending it back and fitting it again, seem a very pleasant way of spend- ing time in Paris. The only other thing you must do that day is get dressed for dinner at nine. Next week you and Mon- sieur are going off to the little country place in Normandy for a rest anyway. Chic, chic, it rests on the craftspeople, the servants, the time, and the money which Monsieur has inherited, or found somewhere. Maybe he works just a little. Maybe Madame came from Pittsburgh with a fortune in coal mines. He will love her legs which are a little too fat, and she will love to be a countess. It doesn't cost too much in Europe, what with the coal mines and the wages one pays. The ladies' maid gets $20 a month plus her commissions. The butler doesn't get much more. There's plenty left for the Rolls Royce and the small villa of forty rooms in Cannes. It's a wonderful life. The food is superb, the wine better. The sun is warm when it should be and the snow is on the Alps if Madame wants to ski. The main problem of the chic life is having the right clothes to wear in the temperature one happens to prefer at the time. In June you must have special clothes for London and Ascot. In January you find yourself setting out for the Lido, with the proper nakedness to catch the sun. You may have to get some shooting togs for October in Scotland, and there are the proper evening clothes for playing roulette in Biarritz in March. And Madame is attractive. No one, however jealous of her leisurely life, could dare to deny it. Sometimes she gets too fat or too thin. Sometimes she has nerves and develops wrinkles. But all of these things can be kept in shape by mas- sage, facials, doctors, and what not. A group of chic women, beautifully dressed, in perfect taste for the occasion, clean 22 and well-groomed, are about as seductive a picture as the heart could wish. They are perfectly sure of themselves, and their posi- tion, their clothes and their friends. They are photographed and written about. They are built up. The great French leg- end rests lightly on their lovely white or sun-tanned shoul- ders. The French couturier knows and understands these women — and no other women. He creates the major part of their chic, supplemented as it is by accessories and all that goes into being well-groomed. All beautiful clothes are designed in the houses of the French couturiers and all women want those clothes. You can read it in the newspapers. You can read it in the maga- zines. Your best friend will tell you so. Once chic existed innocently enough, the natural result of French dressmaking and the leisurely life. Everyone ac- cepted it quietly as the normal thing for those who could have it. It is simply the expensively fashionable angle of real style. What the thief, fashion, did to it is of vital interest to the American public. Armed with the tools of mass produc- tion, aided by the advertising man and the promotion expert, abetted by a wild prosperity, fashion has used the French legend for his own scheming ends. 23 3 • Of QPa* SfcrtureJ tn |j\)R the first twenty-f our years of my life, I believed in the JL French legend. Like most middle- and upper-class young people, I was nurtured in it before I ever heard of the cloth- ing business in general or designing in particular. My maternal grandfather was the vice-president of a 25 couple of railroads and, as such, sufficiently affluent to send his two children abroad to polish off their educations. His son, my uncle Fred, studied architecture in Paris and lived in France for several years. My mother was a very independent young woman. Al- though the head of her New York finishing school didn't think it was "proper," she went to Vassar in the gay nineties. She subsequently traveled and lived in France, bicycling about the shores of the Mediterranean in long flowing skirts. She won tennis championships in those same proper clothes. Finally she consented to settle down to married life in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a town her father and uncle had largely owned in the eighties. Her trousseau, most of which is still extant in the family attic, was made in Paris. My earliest recollections of my own clothes hinge on my "Paris dress." I had one a year for some time, brought back from the annual pilgrimage of my grandmother to the land of art and chic. The dresses were always white, batiste or pique, and covered with hand-embroidered eyelets, scallops and blue satin sashes. They invariably had short sleeves and low necks and I was forced to wear guimpes under them in the winter. A guimpe is a sort of shirtwaist with long sleeves and a high neck. I loathed guimpes. I also was greatly disgusted by being made to wear long- legged underwear to dancing school. It made bumps on my ankles and deeply offended my sense of chic. As a reaction I took to dressing kewpies exclusively in hats. A later hangover shows up from time to time in the winter. I have a decided tendency to go out on the coldest nights clad in one chiffon evening dress and an elbow-length velvet cape. However, in spite of being too well clothed for any aes- thetic pleasure in the winters, my childhood passed off quite 26 painlessly. I spent hours on the kewpies' millinery, and more hours making dolls' clothes. Mother was an early Montes- sori addict of modern education and that included being taught to do all sorts of handicrafts. I made dozens of reed and raffia baskets and literally miles of beadwork. The bead- work took me on occasional trips to the Museum of Natural History for designs. My grandfather died before I was born and apparently the excess money just gradually dwindled away. My grand- mother's annual trips to Paris and the resulting clothes ceased quietly. My father and mother produced four chil- dren, of which I was the second, born on December 16, 1903. We had an average middle-class existence in a commuter's town about twenty-five miles from New York. By the time there were four children, we bulged out of the corners of a shingle house which was always going to have an addition but never did. We had a rather nice small wood, behind the house, where we played. Across the side- walkless street there was a big potato patch, on my grand- mother's place, which was always going to be a tennis court, but never got there. There were several brooks within easy playing distance. In the backyard, our playhouse was an old wireless cabin off one of the Southern Pacific ships. My father was an assist- ant manager in that company. We had a big vegetable garden and small flower gardens, one for each child. There were the usual sandboxes, slides, and trapezes spread around a mossy backyard. The grass never would grow because there were so many oak trees the soil was shaded and sour. Mother, with a taste for the finer materials and work- manship in clothes and not much to buy them with, took to having our things made in the house. Our shopping expedi- tions to town consisted in biannual trips to Alexander's to 27 buy shoes, followed by rummaging over remnant counters for wonderful material. Then we walked by the windows of nice expensive French-importing shops and mother made sketches on bits of paper. This was always followed by lunch at Henri's or Maillard's and once a year a trip to the Hippo- drome, once a trip to the circus, finally occasional theaters. My first theater was "The Blue Bird" and I still remember quite well the color of one blue stage set. The dressmaker would come for a week at a time and, with patterns and sketches, run up our clothes. We were my older sister, myself, four years younger than she, my little sister, four years younger than I, and a brother two years younger than she. By the time I was nine or ten, I took to sewing my own clothes. When I was twelve, I went into dressmaking profes- sionally. First I made a few clothes for younger children, daughters of mother's friends. The drive was entirely eco- nomic. I always wanted to buy something, beads for the bead- work, material for another dress, Christmas presents. A Mrs. Drinker in Ridgewood made really very charm- ing and beautiful clothes for her young daughter and also for a little shop in Haverford, Pennsylvania. She regarded my sewing activities with interest and some amusement and offered to try and sell some of my things to the shop. It was called the Greenaway Shop, I remember. I designed and made up a couple of gingham dresses and one of unbleached muslin with applique embroidery for ages three to five which she sent to the shop. They were priced about $2.50 each. The material probably cost a dollar. The shop re-ordered on the muslin dress, four of them in differ- ent sizes. There my professional dressmaking activity ceased for a while. I graduated from grade school and went on to the 28 high school. Social and school life took up all my time ex- cept for making my own clothes. I designed and made all of them from then on and on and on forever, except for occa- sional lapses in France later. I used Vogue and Harper's Bazaar freely, copying sketches or changing them. This further enforced the French legend on my mind. All beautiful clothes were designed in France and all women, including myself, wanted them. How I escaped going to art school instead of Vassar, I don't know exactly. I made a slight move in the art school direction but the family tradition for Vassar was strong. My older sister was there, following in mother's footsteps. There was no fuss about whether or not I was going. I was a good student and passed my comprehensives without any trouble. My first year at Vassar was marked by nothing much in particular. My sister was a senior and had a good many men for weekends. I tried to fall in with the same plan. It worked with fair success until the end of that year when I lost the beau I had kept hanging over from high school. He went to Williams and, after having me to one house party, outgrew me. I was quite unattractive and as I became progressively more serious-minded during the next three years, I had fewer and fewer boy-friends. Freshman year I was the assistant on costumes for the annual outdoor play. I don't think I designed anything. The play was "Kismet" and my recollection is that I simply worked out the sketches of the girl who was my boss. After having my appendix out that summer, 1922, I went back for sophomore year and discovered economics. I never paid much attention to anything else at Vassar after that. I took the required things, mathematics and chemistry always netted me A's. The literature and art courses I elected bored me and I got B. The economics, such as they were, fas- 29 cinated me. They included not only the law of supply and demand, but Labor Problems, The Family, Socialism, fi- nally Advanced Economic Theory. Senior year I spent four long months in the library reading every word ever spoken or written by Ramsay MacDonald and rewrote it all into a thesis on which I did not one ray of individual thinking — but I got A. Outside the economics classes, I concentrated on clothes. At the end of sophomore year, I went to Parson's School of Fine and Applied Arts in New York for a six weeks' course. I learned a very important thing, namely that no art school, however satisfactory to others, was ever going to teach me how to design clothes. We kept going to the Metropolitan Museum and taking down Coptic designs which we trans- formed painstakingly into colored plates. Then we took bits of the designs and made them into or onto supposedly mod- ern clothes. We took life drawing but no one ever mentioned anatomy to me as a student of dress design. Apparently it did not occur to them that I was going to dress living human be- ings who had bones and muscles. I finished all my assignments in no time and spent hours posing for the advanced students. During the other hours, spent on the subway and train between Ridgewood and up- per Broadway, I decided I'd better learn how clothes were made. The next summer, 1924, through a friend who bought clothes at Bergdorf Goodman, I was able to go into their workroom as an apprentice, unpaid. I got to work at eight- thirty every morning. I got home about seven-thirty every night. We worked on the top floor with skylights letting in all the mid-summer sun. I was so tired I cried every night when I got home. I learned how expensive clothes were made to order. 30 The French imports came into Bergdorf s before I left that summer. There again were those beautiful clothes which legend assured us could only be designed in France. I de- cided I'd better go to France and find out what it was all about. The last college year, '24-'25, was spent half on Ramsay MacDonald, half on how I was to get to France. First I tried to graduate in the middle of the year. I had enough credits. The Dean decided just at that point that one was only capable of doing advanced work after three and a half years at Vassar and that no diploma should be given out before the end of four full years. So I descended to the basement of the library and lived through the last semester with my liberal laborite. The reason I wanted to graduate six months in advance was to have the extra money for going to France. If I'd had any sense, I would have just left. As it was, I faced an eco- nomic problem of no mean proportion, considering the fact that I had exactly $25 a month for everything including clothes. I tried for a scholarship and muffed it for a very simple reason. I went with my best girl friend to a dance at a prep school. It was all done to please her little boy cousin. We were damned if we were going to take off one of our precious four weekends. At Vassar in those days we were only allowed to leave the college four weekends in every semester. So we went to the dance without signing out. When we got there, the whole freshman class was there from Vassar — also without signing up. They all went right back and con- fessed their crime. We maintained silence until someone sent an anonymous letter telling all to the head warden. The authorities called us in and said they never paid any attention to anonymous letters but that we might just as well confess. We did. I didn't get any scholarship. 31 However, I got to work and began to design clothes for my friends. I used a dressmaker nearby for sewing them up. I finally got into a dress shop on the edge of the campus and designed clothes for it. Those clothes were made in a factory in Poughkeepsie and sold quite well. I put ads in the Vassar paper to the effect that I had worked at Bergdorf Goodman and was ready to do anything for anybody. I made a few hundred dollars on commission from the shop. When I told my French teacher I was going to work in France, she just laughed. My French was so bad, I'd dropped it after Freshman year. I went back to it senior year and took a frightful course in advanced French composition which proved quite a boon in writing and made my grammar fairly accurate. My accent was, and remains, perfectly awful. Then everyone joined hands and told me very plainly that I could never get a job in France. They seemed to just know it by instinct. France, they insisted, was for the French. Bonwit Teller at that time had an employment bureau. I can't imagine why. They probably got promising young people into the store that way. They made an endeavor to help get college people any sort of job. They gave me a let- ter to their Paris office. One of my friends at Vassar, Evelyn Johnson, had left at the end of her junior year. Her mother was married to a French perfume importer and spent every summer in France. Evelyn decided to go to Paris with me when I sailed after college. She thought her mother might help me to get a job. I had a few harassed moments in the late spring between economics and clothes. After all the time I had spent on la- bor problems, plus Bergdorf's workroom, I began to have vague humanitarian impulses toward saving the world some- how. 32 My mother, I might add, had been saving various situa- tions all her life. First she kept saving the family finances by dealing in family real estate and dabbling around the stock market. Then she had always saved the entire Negro population of Ridgewood from being thrown out of their houses, jailed for drunkenness, or starved to death from lack of work. Most of them had been our servants at one time or another. She worked for years on the board of education and in county politics. Anyone who wanted to know anything about anything in Ridgewood always called up mother. One night a gentleman called up and said, "Mrs. Hawes, what shall I do? Someone is dumping garbage on the lot next to my house." Of course, mother told him what to do. It is necessary to understand, however, that she never told me what to do. When I announced my intention of going to work in Paris, she said, "How long are you going to stay?" Obviously I come naturally by a desire to save humanity. Fortunately, my economics teacher of the moment listened to my wailing around about whether or not it was really the proper thing to devote my life to the matter of clothes. She convinced me without too much difficulty that I might as well take the gifts and desires that God had given me and save a portion of the population from wearing anything but Hawes' designs. Finally the spring of 1925 got over. We received our di- plomas. We went home. I made a few clothes and prepared to sail the first part of July. And I had my first newspaper interview. A woman on the Newark News decided that, since mother was so prominent in our county, I should be interviewed. It was a sort of brave-young-girl-just-starting-out-in-the-world story with quite a nice picture. It brought results. A young advertising lady in a department store in 33 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, wrote me a letter and asked if I wouldn't like to report her some news from Paris which she could use in ads. I think it was to come out to about $15 a month. I responded "yes" very loud. That gave me another thought. I repaired to the local paper and asked them if they wouldn't like me to write them something regular from Paris. They said, "Yes, about $10 worth a month." So Evelyn Johnson and I sailed for France, July 8, 1925, student third class on the Berengaria. I was not seasick and learned to do my first drinking on that voyage. I had three hundred dollars and a diamond ring. It had been one of my grandmother's earrings. The family had it set and said I could always pawn it to get home. I still have it. 34 4 ura BEFORE the big docks were built, the harbor at Cherbourg was the very nicest place to land in France for the first time. You were taken off your big boat and put onto a tug which sidled into such a pleasant, small, inefficient world. The porters screamed and lost your baggage while you slowly 35 digested the low, whitish houses, red tile roofs topped by long "Tonique" signs, backed by small green hills. We landed on the fourteenth of July. I felt as if I'd gotten home after all those years. The fourteenth being what it is, the one big national free-for-all fete, our train took fourteen hours getting from Cherbourg to Paris. Ordinarily it takes about five. It seemed the engineer got off at every town to dance in the streets or something. I loved it. I always relax the minute I hit the French shore. I knew then, as I do every time, that there just isn't any hurry. I know now, as I didn't know then, that the food will be good at every little inn, the wine lovely and the beds di- vine. I like the land and the people in France. If I had been born French, I would be very happy about it every morning. I wasn't born French so I finally had to come home and be an American, after much had happened. I didn't go to France because it was beautiful and peaceful and full of good food. I went to learn about chic. I learned plenty. We installed ourselves in a cheap Parisian pension, Eve- lyn and I. We shopped with our girl-friends and I penetrated those gigantic dressmaking places, the homes of the French couturiers, for the first time. The other girls bought clothes while I watched and felt quite terrified at finally being right in the middle of all chic. I was so scared I didn't really see much, just very large rooms and very smooth salesladies, very thick carpets and very beautiful clothes. We'd go afterward and have enormous lunches with fifty- four kinds of hors d'oeuvres and wonderful cheese. Then we'd ride in carriages through the Bois, down long, long lanes of trees. I never got used to the idea that a forest should exist without any underbrush, even on the edge of Paris. We had our tea in some treesy place and rather hurried the driver back to the Ritz bar. 36 There the boys who'd just graduated from Princeton and Yale and Harvard and the whole United States bought drinks for us. "Double Alexandres" I learned to drink at that point. Once after we'd all had three double Alexandres, which I, personally, thought was the name of the drink, we ordered another round. The waiter looked at us very hard and said, "Do you want a double Alexandre — or just a single Alex- andre?" After a few days, I presented myself at Bonwit Teller's Paris office. The head man, French and fat and shiny, said he didn't know. I might come back a little later. I didn't have time to be discouraged at all, because Eve- lyn's mother turned up right away from America. She whipped me around to her dressmaker and muttered a few brief and well-chosen sentences. I was hired. I didn't know for what money or what labor or what kind of place it was, but I had the job. I was to come sometime after the fifteenth of August. Evelyn and I packed up and went along to Evian on the Lake of Geneva with her family. They had a regulation French villa, red brick, white stone trim, gravel walks, too much furniture. I was so preoccupied with getting back to my job and wondering about it that I recall very little of the visit. We motored over the Alps a bit. They are a little too high and mighty for my peace of mind. We tried very hard to read Ulysses and I failed. We went into Geneva and saw where Mr. Wilson had saved the world for Democracy. I thought it was very wonderful. The French were more skep- tical. Finally the middle of August came around and we scam- pered back to Paris. Evelyn got a trousseau and went home 37 to be married, I went to work. My place of business turned out to be a copy house. A copy house is a small dressmaking establishment where one buys copies of the dresses put out by the important re- tail designers. The exactitude of the copy varies with the price, which varies with the amount of perfection any given copy house sees fit to attain. A really perfect copy of a model costs in a copy house just about half what it cost in the place where it was born. I am sure that wherever important couturiers have flour- ished in sufficient numbers to warrant attention, there have been copy houses. Certainly when I was in Paris in 1925 there were plenty of them, and they still continue on their illegitimate way. Since the depression, the large houses in Paris have low- ered their prices and have driven a number of copyists out of existence. The whole matter is of interest, both because it still exists in Paris and because, if retail designers ever rise to any sort of eminence and numbers in New York, we will have our copy houses too. They already exist but are not very virile. Copying, a fancy name for stealing, is also interesting as an example of what a curious and rather degraded business dressmaking may be. The passion which has been created for being chic leads to almost any thing, probably including murder. Most copy houses in Paris are upstairs, on side streets, although the one in which I worked was on Faubourg St. Honore, just a bit up from Lanvin near the Place Beauvais. It was a very good copy house. Our boast was that we never made a copy of any dress of which we hadn't had the original actually in our hands. The front entrance was through one of those perfectly 38 usual heavy stone-rimmed doors, into a dark and reasonably unclean hall, up a winding stair to a door which bore a brass plate marked with the name of the house, call it Doret. There was a door-bell. The back entrance was on through the first floor hall, across a rather dirty court, up a very narrow and definitely dirty flight of stairs to a door with no name on it. That door led to the stockroom. The back stairs continued up to a floor of workrooms, and above that to a kitchen and small dining room where everyone except the actual sewing girls ate lunch together, when there was time to eat lunch. The house was supposed to be closed from twelve to two for lunch. If a customer was in at twelve, we were stuck until she left. If there was no customer, the front door was locked at twelve, and the loud clarion voice of Madame Doret, re- sounded through the place, "A table!" We had very good substantial food, soup, rabbit stew, salad and cheese. There was plenty of red wine and chunks of bread. Monsieur Doret, the only man in the place, was master of the table. He always wore a cigarette stuck behind his ear for lunch, and spoke in Montmartre argot, that low- down slang which one is not taught at Vassar. It took me a good two months to get to the point of following the luncheon conversation. Copy houses are not chic in interior decoration. They are in business for the sole purpose of underselling the designers from whom they steal their wares. Our main entrance was usually unlocked, but there was a gong attached to the door so that nobody could sneak in without our knowing it. When there was any suspicion of an approaching raid, the front door was locked. One rang for admittance. Sometimes we answered the bell. If we actually expected a raid, we just didn't. All the old customers knew how to get in by the rear 39 entrance and when the copy-house-seeking police were on the rampage, we didn't want any new clients. If the customer got in, she entered a small hall with a dingy carpet, walked past a tiny office on the left which was used hy the salespeople and the sketcher and, in times of great rush, as a fitting room. On the right was a large office where Monsieur Doret plied his nefarious trade of keeping a double set of books. It appears to me to be especially a French characteristic, not in any sense limited to the dress business, to hate to pay taxes. Monsieur Doret made a great point of doing all transac- tions in cash. Although the set-up did not indicate any great amount of profit, it was he, rather than any of my rich Amer- ican friends, who got the Bankers Trust to open an account for me in which I kept a couple of dollars a month. I gathered he had both a dollar and a franc account there and they re- spected him. In Monsieur Doret's office hung such model dresses as we kept to show. There were very few of them. We sold mostly from sketches. The models were not copies. They repre- sented our "front." At the beginning of every season we ran up a few boring little sport dresses for show. My job was selling Americans who didn't speak French — also bringing customers, if possible. I improved my sketch- ing a bit and helped with that. The hours were nine to when- ever you got through, around six, and I received the munifi- cent salary of 500 francs a month, about $20 in 1925. If a customer arrived without any introduction, or if we suspected her integrity, we showed her our own models and bowed her out. If we knew her, or her introduction was good, we took her into a small salon which contained one large table, a useless fireplace, a dilapidated rug, four or five badly painted imitation Louis XV chairs. 40 We then got together whatever authentic copies we had, mostly dresses in the process of being made for other cus- tomers. We pieced out with the sketch books and made our sales. Madame Doret was the brains and energy of it all. She had worked in the business under another woman who finally retired and left it to her and Monsieur. She was little, about five feet three, with wonderful legs and feet. Her hair was curly and brown, and her eyes very bright and black. She never walked. She had a sort of abbreviated run which got her everywhere at once. She spent most of her time making lists in the stockroom, and dashing out to see important cus- tomers. Her appointments were usually after five, at which time she shut herself up in the salon with a batch of foreign men, or an odd French woman. Out of this we always received a new set of models. The house was closed for July and half of August. This was to give us a vacation, but primarily to give Lanvin and Vionnet, Chanel and the rest time to get their collections together so we could copy them. I went to work the fifteenth of August, 1925. There were practically no models but they began to appear. By September first we had a nice collection of fifty or sixty perfect copies, exact material, exact color, exact embroidery. I never got any satisfactory answers as to how they got there, but after a few months I became sufficiently trusted to become embroiled in the business of stealing. It wasn't considered stealing. It was just business. Lots of people wanted Chanel's clothes who couldn't afford them, and we filled the gap. I discovered, to my great surprise, that we actually bought models. I discovered this because I was sent to buy them. I was American and young and unsuspected. When it became 41 pretty sure that there was a particularly good dress some- where, and we were not going to be able to get it free, or half price, or by any of the other hooks and crooks which I finally learned, we bought it. The dress was described to me in detail and usually I was given the number. I then repaired to the couturier's in question, and either used the vendeuse of a friend, or just was very American and had never been to Paris before. If the dress was for an older woman, I bought for my mother, whose measures I had, and to whom I was taking the dress. If it was young enough, I had it made and fitted on me. I think not more than four or five models a season were bought that way. But there was one more thing to be done at the couturier's. The embroidery men always came around to us with the embroidery for certain dresses from the big houses, particularly Callot, who was successful still. I would go and look up those dresses and see how they were made, if possible. With the exact embroidery, and my sketch, our model turned out pretty authentic. So where did the rest of the clothes come from? Three major sources: customers, mistresses, and foreign buyers. I don't know how many years it takes a copy house to get the sources, but ours were both good and plentiful. Some of the richer customers were women who bought a good many clothes directly from the designer. They then filled in their wardrobes chez the bootlegger. They liked the bootlegger and they let her copy their clothes in return for which they probably paid even larger prices, but still only half the price of an original. Perhaps some of them did get really low prices. The matter of price is seldom a fixed one in any dressmaking establishment, bootleg or not. It made me very proud to have tea at the Ritz and see our customers in their Chanels, exactly like the real Chanels 42 across the table. One of the wonderful things about the chic monde in Paris seemed to me to be their fantastic desire to all have the same dress. In those days, it was always black. It was not smart to be economical, so if you had a copy, it really had to be perfect. We dressed some of the really chic women. Their return favors probably gave us a quarter of our models. Half of the models came through foreign buyers. This always seemed to me a rather sordid business. I do not know, but I assume, that we paid out some money for the privilege of copying the models. I really felt like a thief the day I dis- covered how that worked. I knew that many of the big couturiers delivered clothes just exactly in time to make certain boats, or they tried to. I always thought it was because they were busy with orders. What they really try to do is prevent leaks. But they don't succeed. Some of the better copy houses are run by people who work, or have worked, in resident buying offices. The supply of models is thus assured. It was during the mid-season showings in November that I was initiated into the mystery of the resident buyer and the copy house. All manufacturers or stores who buy in Paris work through their resident buying offices which attend to everything for them. The resident buyer and his staff arrange for tickets to the openings, attend the home-office buyers hand and foot, day and night, while they are in town, and subsequently receive and ship the purchases to America or wherever. One of our most frequent visitors, the only one who was ever invited to lunch, was a resident buyer for a large Amer- ican manufacturer. Madame Ellis was an American who had lived abroad for years. She was about fifty-five, exceedingly attractive, and pretty smart. Anything she lacked in brains 43 she had fully made up for in experience. She seldom got any clothes from us, and I never saw her bring anything into the place. She was obviously an old and trusted friend of the management, and spent a good many weekends at the Do ret country place. I had a very large beaver coat. A fur coat in Paris is quite a rarity among the working class. Mine turned out to have a special value. I was requested to don it one day in November and go to the resident buying office through which Madame Ellis worked. It was toward the end of the mid- season buying, the day before a large boat was to sail. The buying offices in Paris, excepting a few of those owned and run by American firms, are, like the copy houses and most of Paris, situated in old stone buildings, built about dirty courts. The halls are dark and the stairs wind you up to the offices. I went up to Madame Ellis' office. She was there, alone, with a large pile of boxes from Chanel. The boxes were hastily opened, dresses pulled out and shaken from their tis- sue paper covers. "Put them under your coat," said Madame, "and get them back here as fast as you can." I automatically obeyed, delighted to be in the process of verifying this source, flew downstairs, into a taxi, to the Faubourg St. Honore, up our backstairs, and shed my booty on the floor of the stockroom. The workgirls had gone home. The fitters were there. They took the clothes and made ac- curate patterns of them, while I made accurate sketches. Madame Doret even more accurately examined every line, made notes on buttons, belts, cut bits of material from the seams, and looked over the finishing. We had six or eight new Chanels to sell. Someone was sure to say, however untruthfully, during the examination, "How Chanel has the nerve to deliver 44 clothes made this way! Look, it's all cut off the grain. The inside seams aren't even finished." But, well or badly made, the idea was there, we had it, and the clothes went back under my fur coat. I went back in a taxi to my waiting Madame Ellis. The models were put back in their tissue paper, and off they went to New York on a fast boat. That was the only office I ever went to for that purpose. But it was by no means the only office from which we got models. That happened to be an order for New York. We got a great many clothes from a Dutch buyer who probably got a cut on the profits, or some such thing. And there was also a German who did a good deal of running in and out with packages. There was a regular business of buying muslin patterns of dresses. The patterns began to appear as soon as the work- rooms of the big designers got going on a new collection. They were often not authentic, so we didn't buy many. These patterns were, of course, stolen by the sewing girls who worked in the ateliers of Vionnet, Lanvin, etc., and copied as the new designs were made up. A more picturesque source was the mistress. Our best mistress was kept by the manager of a famous designer. She got all her clothes from the big house. Then she rented them out to various copyists to turn an honest penny on the side. This source always rather pleased me, but Madame Doret didn't really like it much because those particular models got into the hands of every copy house in town. One couldn't help thinking that all of this might be stopped. It might have. But, for one thing, I doubt if the fabric houses wanted it stopped. They could have simply refused to sell the materials to copyists. They didn't. At least, we always bought direct and I was never aware of any diffi- 45 culty. The fabric houses must have sold as much to copyists of certain materials as they ever did to the originator of the model. And there is an old tradition in Paris that the day a designer isn't copied, he is dead. However, efforts were made to close up copy houses from time to time. The general bootlegging atmosphere always prevailed at our place. Models were never left in sight, and everything was constantly kept in readiness to be hurried out the door. This may have been because a few years before I went there, the place had been raided. The whole story is typical of the devious ways in which the copyists continue their ex- istence against any odds. The house was raided by the police, acting for a combination, which I remember included Lanvin and Callot, and, I think, one other large couturier. There is a special organization in Paris which is main- tained by the couturiers for the purpose of protection against copying. Lanvin, Callot, et al., on suspecting a certain copy house, turn the matter over to this bureau who in turn calls in the police of the district to pull a raid. The copy house must be caught with the actual and perfect copies on the premises before it can be prosecuted. Madame Doret was caught with the goods, perfect copies, and a suit was brought. But it all came out okay, and why? The intelligent little Madame Doret had once been very kind to a customer. The customer had gone motoring with a gentleman, and was hurt in an auto accident. The gentle- man with whom she was motoring was not the gentleman who was paying her bills. How she landed on the hands of her copyist at this point, I do not know, but Madame Doret got her off into hiding, and took care of the whole affair, so that not a word ever got about. The gentleman who paid her bills just happened to be a minister in the government. 46 So, when the copy house was raided and faced with dis- aster, by a simple gesture Madame Doret got the lady she had befriended to get the minister of the government to do something. The copy house was fined a few thousand francs and closed up — for two months. If couturier designers, people who design for and main- tain their own dressmaking establishments, ever rise to a sufficient prominence in New York, we will have our Dorets to organize the copying for the individual. At the moment, copying is not very serious — in this field. It is done by ineffi- cient people who have not discovered how to get the orig- inals. Even when they do copy, their workmanship is apt to be bad. Of course, when I say there is no copying in New York, I only mean to imply that we don't do things in a small way. We have mass production! 47 5 • ex ne tsnotograjynic LIFE at Doret's, with its multiplicity of customers, their buttons and belts, and an intermingling of excitement in stealing dresses, lasted from August, 1925, until the middle of January, 1926. Everything that had to do with work was a pleasure. 49 I learned to recognize the styles of the various French designers through selling our copies of their clothes. I learned to speak French rapidly, fluently, with a horrid in- terspersing of argot. I led the life of a petite bourgeoise Parisienne saleslady whenever I could. Several times I went to dance halls on Saturday after- noon with the other salesgirls. We went to a very large and gaudy place on Montmartre, greatly resembling Roseland in New York, except that there were no paid girls to dance with. We were the girls. One went in, took a table, ordered a soft drink, and waited. The boys were at other tables or lined up against the wall. When the music started, one of them would come up and bow very formally. Not a word was exchanged. If you liked his looks, you arose and danced. If you didn't like his looks, you politely regretted and were then stuck for that dance. It was not etiquette to turn down one and immediately accept another. The music was frightful, a very big band which played old American jazz badly. If you danced, not a word was spoken by your partner unless you started a conversation. All my conversations were of a very desultory nature and I wasn't much of a success. The instant the music stopped, you were left high and dry just where you stood and had to return alone to your table. Nobody was ever drunk. It was quite like dancing school. Apparently it served the necessary purpose of making new friends. One of the girls from Doret's ultimately mar- ried a Swiss boy she met dancing there. I never had any such luck, although there was one day a gentleman who danced with me several times who was not unattractive. Several months later, as I was quietly having a drink with someone 50 at the Ritz Bar, in he walked with quite an elegant lady. We didn't bow. Often I went home with one of the salesgirls for a family dinner in some very small, very hot, very crowded little apartment in the suburbs of Paris. My favorite dish which came into their menus was rabbit stew, and each girl had a grandmother who had a different way of cooking it. One did it with red wine, another with white, another with no wine at all. It was always delicious. Most of the time after work, I spent by myself. I only had one beau that winter. Men are always very very scarce in Paris for young American girls except when June brings in the tourists. My one young man was half French, half American. His family were all French in speech and habit and I used to be really terrified to go there for meals. I still only half understood conversation in French unless it was di- rected straight at me. My own answers were so full of the slang I'd picked up from Monsieur Doret that every time I opened my mouth, I got a laugh or a look of horror from my hostess. I was painfully shy. So I took to guide books and French architecture and gave myself a course on Saturdays and Sundays, walking around museums, hunting up odd bits of Romanesque sculp- ture on the corners of dilapidated old churches in distant corners of Paris. It filled up time. I've forgotten most of it and I doubt if it did me any good. I have just never been able to distinguish Louis XIV from Louis XV furniture. The burden of my life was finances. I had 500 francs a month from Doret. I had about $25 a month from writ- ing for the newspaper at home and the department store in Wilkes-Barre. It all came to some 1,200 francs, the exchange being about 25 francs to the dollar. 51 For the average French working girl, that was riches. The sewing girls got 300 francs a month for working some forty-eight hours a week. The other salesgirls in our shop had about 800 francs a month with commissions. I was never able to come out right on my 1,200. I had to have a room with central heat and running water. It cost me 700 francs a month. It was madness, but it was clean, large, reasonably livable. The bed was set into an alcove in the wall with cur- tains so I didn't get any air at night but it could look like a living room. I had a little closet with the running water. Baths were 3 francs each. It is possible to keep clean without baths. I made my breakfast on a sterno, had my lunch free at the shop. Most of my dinners I ate in the Foyer Feminine, a sort of French Y.W.C.A., where there was a cafeteria and I could get a meal for a couple of francs, less than ten cents. I should have managed but I never quite did. The reason was that every time I got a hundred francs ahead, I went out and bought myself ninety-nine francs' worth of good food in an expensive restaurant. So most of the time I had about five francs between me and my diamond ring. I didn't have time to get bored with Doret's. After I'd mastered the copying business and my French, Madame Ellis stepped into the breach. She took to chatting with me in the office more and more often. Finally she offered me a job. Would I like to sketch, during the next buying season, for her New York manufacturer? The question meant one thing to me. I would get into all the couturiers' houses and see their collections. To Ma- dame Ellis and her boss, Mr. Weinstock, it meant something much more important. The situation among American buyers in Paris during the years I worked there was very simple. As a buyer of 52 expensive French models for American mass production, you stole what you could and bought what you had to. Al- most every important buyer took to the first showing of every couturier a sketcher. The sketcher was ostensibly an assistant buyer. Her real job was to remember as many of the models as possible and subsequently sketch them for the buyer to copy in New York later. The sketching business was a very lucrative one for a young woman living in Paris. The buyer who took you in bought, automatically, every sketch you could make. I was paid $1.50 a sketch by Weinstock and Co. Besides the ten really important couturiers, there were at least ten others of minor importance. Each couturier shows two major collections of clothes each year, in August and February. Then there are the mid-season small collections in November and April. November is advance spring, April, advance fall. The less important houses show first, and the openings, first showings, continue over a three weeks' period, ending with the most important houses, in those days, Patou, Vionnet, Chanel. A good sketcher can average fifteen accurate sketches per collection. The sketches are not made at the collection, of course. It is entirely a question of memory, assisted by whatever notes one can make at the showing without attract- ing the attention of the salespeople. Having seen the clothes and made the notes, the sketcher rushes home to draw the dresses. Since the buyer does not buy at the opening, but returns later for that purpose, the sketcher has a second chance to see the clothes in which the buyer is interested and afterwards can correct the sketch. As Madame Ellis explained to me, Weinstock would buy the entire 300 sketches, netting me $450. And that was not all. Through her, I could contact buyers who were not for- 53 tunate enough to have their own sketchers. I might sell them copies of the original designs and garner in another couple of hundred dollars. As a sketcher becomes known to the buyers, they leave her blanket orders for a hundred sketches at a time of the openings which they do not come to Paris to see. Few buyers came for the mid-season collections. It was possible to make as much as a thousand dollars in the three weeks of the openings. Since one could live in comparative luxury on $100 a month in Paris in 1926, and, as a sketcher, had a chance to earn between $500 and $1,000 every four months, it was a perfect existence financially. Between buying seasons, one could rest and travel on the ill-gotten gains. As an embryo designer, the opportunity to see all the work of the Paris couturiers was unquestion- ably my greatest desire. The desire was so great that I did not for one moment consider the ethics of the matter. I had come to Paris for one thing: to learn about designing clothes. I was convinced, then and now, the best way to learn was by working in the field. And besides it was the only practical way for me. I must support myself to my education. I accepted Madame Ellis' offer and got my second lesson in how to acquire French designs at something less than re- tail price. I met the American buyers. At the beginning of every new season in Parisian dress- making, the city is flooded with dress buyers from all over the world. There were fewer American than others, German, English, Dutch, South American. I dealt only with the Amer- icans. I suppose the rest of them had their sketchers too. The American dress buyers were of two categories, those who bought for department stores, and for the manufactur- ers. Nowadays, Paris buying is relatively unimportant to the department store. They rely on the manufacturers to 54 buy for them. In the halcyon days before 1929, everybody bought. The department store buyer had an allowance which varied with the size of her department and the importance of her store. Many such buyers actually bought only four or five dresses a season. They came mainly to get the new fashion trends at first hand as a guide to later buying from manufacturers in New York. I think the biggest store buyers in those days were Bergdorf Goodman and Hattie Carnegie. They probably bought fifty to seventy-five models at least. The big houses charge around $200 a model. There was the duty to pay getting it into the United States. There were the sizable traveling expenses of the buyers. It is safe to assume that each dress cost $400 in toto, so that an impor- tant buyer spent between twenty and thirty thousand dollars a season. One can easily understand what an evil day it was for the French when the department stores realized that buying models was not necessary for them. Of course, Carnegie and Bergdorf and many other specialty shops still buy a good many models, but they have cut down considerably. They cannot sell for $250 what a manufacturer has copied for $25. The big manufacturing houses bought from twenty-five to fifty models. They, too, have cut down on the number. There are certain people who buy a large number of models and afterward rent them out to manufacturers to copy in New York. It is not necessary to spend thirty thousand dol- lars to know what the French are designing or to make copies of it. But 1926 gave no hint of the impending disaster. The buyers came in dozens. Ours came toward the end of Jan- uary. 55 Mr. Weinstock was a large, gray-haired, rather dapper gentleman, owner of one of the largest and best expensive- dress manufacturing houses in New York. He made after- noon and evening clothes which sold wholesale about $89.50, retail around $175. With him he had two designers. One of them, a roundish lady in her forties, had been with the firm for ten years. The other designer was a snappy young Italian, rather chic and definitely attractive. Their great task was to see all the new clothes in Paris. Of these they would buy about fifty. The two designers would take all the ideas they could garner in. I would provide them with as many sketches as was humanly possible. Fortunately for me in my new job, the first week or so of a buying season is easy. Only the unimportant houses are showing. They are not in a position to be rude to buyers who see their clothes and don't buy. They are not in a posi- tion to stop sketchers from taking a good many notes. All the houses knew perfectly well that one in every eight people at an opening was a sketcher. The sketchers were all young, not particularly well dressed. A sketcher has a special photographic way of looking at a dress, engraving its image on her mind, marking her program a little too freely. In the small shops, we were allowed to ply our out- rageous trade because, after all, what difference did it make? The buyers would buy a dress even if we did steal six others. It was worth it. The big couturiers made a decided effort to catch us. However, if Mr. Weinstock was buying six dresses at Patou, it was a ticklish business, in the face of a $1,200 order, to risk insulting the wrong person. They had to catch us red- handed which seldom happened. The season may have started off easily, but it rose to a nerve-racking pitch in the last week. One after another 56 the big couturiers opened their doors and showed their hun- dreds of new designs to the rapacious buyers. On Tuesday, at ten A.M., I would meet the Weinstock group at Premet. There I was planted between the two de- signers. Every time one of them wanted a dress sketched, she'd poke me in the ribs with her elbow. I'd settle my eyes on the dress and leave them there until the mannequin who wore it had made her last turn, her final flip of the fanny. Then I'd carefully make an identifying note beside the number of that dress on my program. "No. 23 Champs Elysees," the program would say. I'd say "Bl . . 4 bts sq nk." meaning black dress with four buttons down one side of a square neck. After that I would very carefully not look at anything until I got another poke in the ribs. I'd just sit and say over and over to myself, "Black wool crepe with four six-inch pleats on the left hip, patent leather belt with snail buckle, square neck quite high with a pleated ruffle on it," and so on. Amazingly enough, hours later, it would all come back to me. The minute the Premet showing finished, I'd dive into a taxi and go home. There, with a glass of milk for lunch, I'd draw up the notes. Then, into another taxi and so to Lanvin at 2:30. After Lanvin, 5:00, back to Premet to look over the clothes while the buyers bought one or two. By seven, I'd be home again, correcting the Premet sketches and making drawings of the notes on Lanvin. By 7:30, 1 must be out again with a book containing the finished sketches from the day before. If I didn't catch the buyers while they were dressing for an evening of gaiety, I never would. Into the Crillon. "May I come up, Mrs. Morovitz?" Of 57 course. None of them ever passed up a chance to get another sketch of a dress they wanted but hadn't bought. "I have the sketches from Callot, Mrs. Morovitz." She'd look them over, order four or five. Then, "I hope, Miss Hawes, that you'll get a good set from Patou tomorrow." "Of course, Mrs. Morovitz. Today I got Premet and Lan- vin. I'll bring them in to you tomorrow night." "Oh, well, why don't you wait and bring them the next day along with the Patou sketches. There isn't a boat going until Thursday." The sketches were sent out on every fast boat, giving the left-at-home designers something to work on. From Mrs. Morovitz, I'd go on to two or three other hotels and other buyers. Finally, after a beer and a ham sandwich at the corner bistro, home again. Home, at 10:30 P.M., to sit down and make thirty finished sketches, the notes from Premet, corrected, those from Worth, left over from the Monday afternoon showing. Into bed by two in the morning. Ten-thirty found me repeating the pattern at Paquin. two-thirty saw us breathlessly waiting a major event. Jean Patou was opening. Patou's openings were gigantic. His showrooms were vast, delicately Louis something-or-other, and jammed with the united buying strength of the world. We sat with our backs to the long and tightly closed windows. The Place Vendome lay peacefully without. Within, the haze of ciga- rette smoke became thicker and thicker as Patou poured out his new elegance, his new colors, his champagne. Patou's openings were pie for me. I took a back seat, which meant there were rows of people between me and the clothes and the prying eyes of any saleslady. There was no need for any rib-poking indication of what I was to sketch. 58 I was to sketch the Fords. A Ford is a dress which everyone buys. Patou decided in advance what models were to be Fords. His showmanship was perfect and unique among the cou- turiers. He put Fords on six at a time, all alike in line and cut, different in color. This, Mesdames, is No. 46. Here are six of them. You will each order this dress. You will all go home and make six thousand more. My job was to get all the Fords down cold. There were at least thirty to a Patou collection and Weinstock wouldn't buy more than eight. The rest might be by Patou, but they were, for Mr. Weinstock, out of Hawes. From my sheltered position, I took elaborate notes and sometimes even sketched. Between Fords, I surveyed the buyers. It was a sight which never ceased to shock me. These two hundred men and women I saw getting tipsy were the people who picked America's clothes. There was not, in the entire gathering, one woman of style, not a male or a female who was distinguishable from the other one hundred and ninety-nine. Of mink coats, there were plenty, of diamonds, a sufficient number, and not a few of them real. There was a vast accumulation of silver fox across rows of lumpy laps which had a tendency to let hand- bags slide down, over thickish ankles, to Patou's polished floor. Here and there was Fashion rampant, usually in black with white at the neck and a droopy hat from Rose Descat, banal, boring, slim-ankled and thin-nosed. When a Ford appeared, all the minks and foxes throbbed a little. Descat hats leaned over to graying sleek heads like Mr. Weinstock's. Whispers. "Mamsel! Your number. Come over here, Mamsel." Mutters. Bergdorf 's buyer took that number. Carnegie took 59 that number. Lord and Taylor took that number. Macy's took that number. Weinstock took that number. When you go to an opening, you are given a printed program with the number and name of each dress. As the clothes glide by, you check the numbers which interest you. Maybe you want to buy the dress. Maybe you just want to have another look at that sleeve. Maybe you want Elizabeth Hawes to have a good hard look at it so she'll be sure to get that sketch accurate. Every buyer has a certain saleswoman. As the buyer leaves after the first showing, she gives the numbers she has selected to her saleswoman. An appointment is made for the buyer to come back, look over her numbers, buy — buy or look again. Getting out of Patou's after an opening, into the serenity of the Paris dusk was to drop ten years from your life, and you needed an extra ten years for the next day. The next day came Chanel. Chanel, the battle cry of the world of fashion for nearly a decade. One had to have tickets of admission for all im- portant openings. For the Chanel opening, they were at a premium. She had two small salons and that was that. If you weren't a big enough buyer, you couldn't get in. Weinstock bought as many as ten dresses a season so we all got in. We got in, our hats over one ear, our coats half pulled off our backs. We drove our way through a mob of screaming men and women who filled the rue Cambon with their wail- ing. They were wailing because they didn't have any tickets and Chanel was in a position to be firm. We planted ourselves in the front row and I knew that at last I was up against it. None of your Patou circus atmos- phere. No liquor. Nothing but very tall saleswomen posted in every corner, overlooking the crowd, fixing their icy stares 60 on every little sketcher and every mink-coated buyer alike. No long program to write on. Just a small slip of paper. No long looks at the models. They simply flew in and out. When I stole designs from the French dressmakers, it was, originally, a game which I developed between me and the mannequin. Her part was to try and get the dress out of the room before I could master the cut of it. My part was to digest its intricacies without missing a seam or a button. I was good. By the time I'd finished my second season of sketching, I could have designed you as pretty a Chanel as the master herself. But swiping her designs accurately was violent mental exercise. If you made any more moves with your pencil than enough to write the equivalent of a number, someone sud- denly leaned over your shoulder and grabbed your paper out of your hand. And these were the sketches the buyers wanted most. After a Chanel opening, you didn't wait until the next day to go back and buy. You made a date for the first hour you could get and were taken in relation to your buying power. The showing finished about five and we were back at seven, after cocktails at the Ritz Bar for the buyers and my usual dash home to draw the notes. Chanel's success was one of the things that helped drive me out of the sketching business. I never had any great re- spect, to put it mildly, for the buyers who employed me. They knew what they had to do and they done it. I knew I wanted to see clothes and I saw them. The totally mad desire which filled the world for Chanel's designs gave rise to a new angle in stealing them. When we went back to Chanel after the opening to buy, my employers shut me up in a fitting room. They posted one of the gang at the door and the two others went out foraging. 61 The showrooms were a madhouse. Clothes were lying in tired piles on every chair. Harassed salespeople were dashing about, telling their assistants for the love of heaven to find No. 234. The minute anyone heard someone else asking for No. 234, every buyer in the place asked for it too. They were always afraid they'd miss a "good number." If you missed a good number, when you got home your boss said to you, "For what do I send you to Paris? That you should pass up that black satin at Chanel!" Weinstock's employes weren't passing anything up. Prac- tically every time there was a wild hunt for a number, it was being held up in front of me in the fitting room. I was sitting comfortably on a chair, guarded from without, sketch- ing Chanels without having to play any game. We got away with practically the whole collection. Then, carried away by their success, one of the buyers began stuffing bunches of samples into her mink pockets. The other one tore fringe off all the fringed dresses so she could have it copied in New York. Finally one of them stole a belt off a dress. My buyers were no exceptions to the rule. The next sea- son at Chanel's, no belt was ever brought into a fitting room with a dress. I made a lot of money off Chanel sketches that season. I finally contracted to do another season of sketching for Weinstock, four months later. But my heart wasn't in it. I started off with a chip on my shoulder and was definitely uncooperative. I made bad sketches and left out as many lines as I dared. The French were making beautiful clothes and, heaven knows, I was in a position to believe that all women must want them. I began to feel that the clothes should be paid for. 62 One day, during my third and last season of sketching, the summer of 1926, 1 had an appointment to meet my buy- ers at Miller Soeurs. I got there early. Miller Soeurs was originally a copy house. After they'd copied for a while, they got so they could design well enough themselves so they set up a model house of their own. When I got there, they just took one look at me. (I'd been there the two previous seasons, of course, with Wein- stock.) They said, "We're sorry, but we won't let you in." I said, "You're perfectly right," and left, feeling much better. When I met my buyers at Lelong's that afternoon, they raised unholy hell with me. They said I had betrayed them and whatnot. I'd gotten far beyond the point of caring what they thought, but I found I had finished with the business of stealing designs. Not that it mattered to anybody. There's always some new young American girl who looks innocent enough to be taken into Chanel's under the guise of an assistant buyer. The French have tried to stop the flagrant sketching and stealing at the openings. In 1930, they raided the apartment of one of the big sketch vendors and threw her into jail for a few minutes. And they have tightened up considerably on who gets into openings. Today a new buyer may be admitted to the house of any couturier of importance once if she is properly accred- ited. If she doesn't buy, she may not go in the next season. She must buy one thing to gain readmittance. As a brand new young manufacturing designer explained to me, after making her first trip from Seventh Avenue to Paris and the openings in 1937, "You see, all you have to buy is one blouse and that's only $50. It's worth it." She knew how to sketch herself. 63 6 • Q_s te . , news MY FIRST sketching season ended in February, 1926. I went into it penniless and came out with $500 in the Bankers Trust. I'd been in Paris eight months and was at last solvent. I still believed firmly that all beautiful clothes were made in the house of the French couturiers and that all women wanted them. 65 I took one fifth of my capital and invested it in a lovely little suit at Callot where I got a special price. I got a spe- cial price because I had purchased things there for Madame Doret. My saleslady at Callot thought they were for my mother. She always felt I should have something for myself so I took advantage of her innocence. Subsequently I dressed myself at Callot for some time, getting some beautiful bargains in stylish clothes which lasted me for years. I had an extra fondness for Callot be- cause the American buyers found her out of date and un- fashionable. She was. She just made simple clothes with wonderful embroidery. Embroidery wasn't chic. The occasion of my extravagance was my mother's com- ing to Europe. I hadn't had a new rag to my back since I left America. I met my mother at Cherbourg the first of March, dressed in my new suit and feeling very fine. I proceeded to initiate her into life as I had seen it in Paris, including the food at the Foyer Feminine. She proceeded to initiate me into taking taxis, eating good food, taking a bath every day, and otherwise enjoying the fine things of life. We traveled around Normandy and Belgium. When she left I still had most of my $400. I also had reacquired a desire for an American standard of living. An- other buying season was knocking at the door, mid-season April, 1926, in the shape of Madame Ellis, who expected me to sketch for Weinstock. I sketched, filled many outside orders. I banked $750 on May first and hated myself a little and all American buyers much more. The minute that season finished, I leapt onto a bicycle and spent three weeks touring Brittany with Bettina Wilson. 66 As a foil for the dressmaking racket, it proved eminently successful. All you can take with you on a bicycle trip is a sweater, an extra set of underclothes, and a toothbrush. You have a perfect and intimate view of the scenery coupled with just the right amount of exercise. At the end of your easy-going thirty miles a day, you invariably find that delectable supper and wonderful bed for which the French are so justly famous. At the end of three weeks, you are exceedingly healthy and so utterly filthy that a return to the fashionable life is all you ask. True, after ten months in Paris, I was not yet fed up on clothes, style, fashion, the Ritz Bar, Montmartre or the Bois de Boulogne. The buyers appeared to me to be a horrible phenomenon created by God to disgust me and all the French couturiers. I saw that it was worth it to the French. Obviously, it was worth it to me. Otherwise I should not have had my bicycle trip. After the bicycle trip, I still had time and money to get myself to Italy where I joined up with an old college friend. We were motored from Florence to Venice and the lakes. We ended in Geneva where I enjoyed my first look at the Council of the League of Nations in action. I found I was getting like the French, skeptical. Back in my same 800-franc Paris room, I found myself with a few hundred francs and my diamond ring. It was the middle of July, 1926. The buyers were about to descend again. I decided to have another season of sketching, re- plenish my finances. While flitting from opening to opening like a bird of prey, I developed an idea for the future. The future was definitely still Paris to me. I loved it. I had acquired friends, both male and female. I wanted to travel more in Europe. 67 Being thrown out of Miller Soeurs having brought me up sharp on the business of stealing sketches, I must find another means of support. My plan involved going back to New York to start it. The idea was very simple. I saw that there was only one set of fashion news from Paris. I had been feeding bits of it to the store in Wilkes-Barre. They liked and used it. They sent me copies of ads which said that their Paris representa- tive told them everything was blue this season — "and on our fourth floor you will find our version of blue, done with the new flared skirt which our Paris representative tells us is all the rage." I decided that there must be hundreds of small depart- ment stores, who could use this news, who had no direct contact with the source of all fashion. I couldn't think how they ever got on without Paris news every week. I figured that a service could be syndicated and sold to such stores for a reasonable figure. With no further knowledge of small department stores in middle-sized cities than my brief reporting for Wilkes- Barre, I built up my idea, went back to New York, sold it to a syndicate. It was no more unreasonable than most fash- ion reporting ideas. It took me three months to get my syndicate. I kept being sent from one friend on a newspaper to a friend on a mag- azine to a friend in a store to a friend in a syndicate to another friend in another syndicate. All one really requires for put- ting anything over is enough energy and resistance to keep on plugging the idea. Someone will eventually fall. A very large and grandfatherly gentleman was running a syndicate called Cosmos. He gazed down upon me from his great height and bulk and listened with extraordinary interest. He was syndicating a weekly fashion feature from 68 Paris. It was a story with pictures which went to the Post in New York, the Detroit Free Press, the Baltimore Sun and other papers of equal standing. This feature was being run by a boy in Paris who, I was told, was doing a remarkable job. However, it was too much work for one person. The boy screamed by every boat for an assistant. Why shouldn't I be sent, first as an assistant, secondly to work out the syndicate store service idea? While the old gentleman considered that thought, I hap- pened into the newly born New Yorker office. Lois Long was doing their fashion column. Lois Long went to Vassar. The New Yorker had no Paris fashion news. It was arranged in the twinkling of an eye. I was to send them one cable a month and one five hundred word story. For this I would get $150 a month. The Cosmos Syndicate seemed greatly impressed by this news. He hired me. I was a fool. I figured everything in francs. I told him $25 a week would be plenty until we got the store syndicate started. He played poor, but he did send me back to Paris. He had to. I didn't have a nickel left. I returned to Paris rich enough in prospects for my taste, anyway; $250 a month was around 7,000 francs, twice what a French midinette gets in a year. Eagerly I sought out Syl- vestre, my boss, the other employe of the Cosmos Syndicate. Sylvestre's was a typical Paris fashion idea. Sylvestre was a typical 1926 Paris fashion reporter. What Sylvestre told me was this: He was half French. He knew all the great French designers intimately. He un- derstood chic as no one ever had before or since. The great designers would tell him, Sylvestre, things they would never tell an ordinary reporter. He could get advance information. He could obtain sketches never given out to any other re- porter. 69 This is the usual case with fashion reporters in Paris. Each one has some magic way of finding out what no one else can. Either the reporter has a cousin who is a Duke or a rumor floats around that the reporter is very intimately connected with the Count de Falderol. Sometimes, my dear, they say that certain reporters are the bastard daughters of English peers. Anyway, no Paris fashion reporter is quite an ordinary mortal. One couldn't employ just humans to tell about miracles. The grains of truth in Sylvestre's story unfolded them- selves to me in the next month. Sylvestre was half French. Sylvestre knew Jenny quite well. Jenny was a couturier who was of little interest to the fashion world. Sylvestre knew the manager of Redfern well. Redfern was about dead. Syl- vestre knew Charlotte intimately. Charlotte designed for the house of Premet. Premet had nice young clothes which were of no particular importance. The first day I met Sylvestre, he gave me a rendezvous at some hotel on the Champs Ely sees for tea. He told me that everyone was going to wear gray that season and that this was a very smart hotel. I told him that nobody ever went there for tea and besides that, gray was never very much worn because it was too unbecoming. We left the hotel and went back to his apartment where we drank Jamaica rhum and became friends. Sylvestre was not very interested in the store project but he took no time at all in winding me into his newspaper story. His little reporting racket was perhaps the easiest ever worked out. We had to send out one fashion story a week. Each story was about one designer and carried with it six sketches. We got absolutely no information that anyone else couldn't also get. It worked this way. On Monday we realized that a fast 70 boat was getting off Wednesday. Sylvestre called whatever big designer we had next on the list. He called the press agent whom he had already contacted and to whom he had explained all, mostly how he was the most important news- paper person in Paris. The press agent was being paid to get his designer into the papers so it wasn't very difficult for him to lay his hand on six sketches. It was particularly easy for him because Sylvestre never cared what sketches we got. All we wanted was six of them with explanations. I would go around and pick up the sketches sometime Tuesday. I usually rounded into Sylvestre's apartment late Tuesday afternoon, sketches in hand. We had a drink. Then we had dinner. Then I sat down at the typewriter and wrote two news columns about the six brand new things in question, things which may have been designed any time during the past four months. At first I often couldn't see anything new about them. Sylvestre taught me to observe every line and pocket. He taught me that everything I saw was new. He taught me how to write a fine lead on the subtlety of Vionnet's rhythmic line or the delicate softness of a Jenny gown. In the begin- ning I often had to do the whole thing over twice, but even- tually I got so I could vomit out the stories in an hour of con- centrated hyperbole. After that, we went out for a drink. The next noon I got the stuff off on the boat train. We repeated it the next week. When I felt forehanded, I got several stories done in a day and left town for a couple of weeks. Once we decided we ought to go to the Riviera. Sylvestre knew Frank Harris and it began to seem that our reporting needed a new note. Frank Harris happened not to be at his villa near Nice and we really didn't have much money. We 71 spent some time in Marseilles and some more time in very cheap night clubs in Nice. One day we went to Monte Carlo by bus. We sent quite a glowing report of the new things on the Riviera that spring. Of course, if you are a conscientious reporter, you don't behave like that. You get up in the morning and go from one hat place to another bag place to the Ritz for lunch. You cultivate the right people, your cousin the count, or your rich friend who has a villa in Cannes. You night-club in the right places. You follow the ponies to the races and the chic monde all over the lot, from London to the Lido. And you suffer. The minute you persuade yourself or some newspaper or magazine in America that there is fashion news in Paris or anywhere else on the Continent every week, you are in for a life of hell. Unless you're blessed with a good healthy im- agination and no inhibitions, you get looking like all other fashion reporters in Paris. Most of them are quite gaunt. Their skin is dry and they have a pinched look around the mouth. They are the dow- diest looking bunch imaginable. They don't make enough money to buy expensive clothes and there isn't anything else in France. Only four times a year is there really fashion news in Paris. Two of those times, it's big news, all the summer or winter clothes, shoes, hats, bags, jewelry which Paris can think up, and that's plenty. The other two times, it's mid-season collections, small fill-in showings of advanced spring or fall clothes, tossed out for foreign buyers. There really isn't much in those show- ings, but the clothes are new and one can legitimately report them as news. In between times, the reporter must manufacture brand 72 new fashion ideas. If you feel like it, you can go to Biarritz or Cannes or the Lido or wherever you can see real, live society women wearing the clothes you formerly saw and have already reported from the previous openings. You can report it all over again as something to scream over. If you're at all bright, you know perfectly well when you see the clothes on the mannequins at Chanel's which ones are going to be seen later at different resorts. If you want to, you can find out from the saleswomen in the various dressmaking houses who bought what. Then all you have to do is watch the society columns to see where the women go and report them there, in the clothes. Even if you go all the places and do all the things, you are still faced with those dreadful weeks when the chic monde seems to have evaporated. The couturiers seem to have bur- ied themselves. It rains. There is nothing new under the sun. You rewrite old columns in a new way. You find eleven different ways of telling the world that women in Paris are wearing two silver foxes around their necks. You concen- trate on details to such an extent that all the world begins to hinge on whether The Duchess de X had on heels an inch high or one and a half inches high. After piling it on thicker and thicker, you send it off to your newspaper syndicate. In a week or so, all the women in the United States are informed of the major events in life. They are left in no doubt but that, unless they can get two silver foxes, they are absolutely out of fashion. They are bombarded with news of what the chic monde is wearing for bathing at the Lido. They don't know where the Lido is or what it looks like and they go to Jones Beach every Sun- day, wearing whatever kind of bathing suit Gimbel chose to provide that season. 73 There must have been over a hundred American fashion reporters in Paris in 1926. Many of them conscientiously sent out news regularly to American newspapers. From what I see now and again in the news columns, a lot of them are still there, turning out the same stuff. However, it is my impression that the American news- paper situation in re Paris fashions is cleaning itself up. The U.S. newspapers have discovered that it is not really good business for them to have in their columns fashion news about things which can't be bought on the spot. They now incline toward columns with a little box at the bottom saying that if you will write in, you will be told in what local store the item mentioned can be bought. The local fashion girls are having their day. In 1926 there were many Paris offices devoted to the business of sending news to the various fashion and women's magazines in America. Of those, Vogue and Harper9 s Bazaar were the largest. They are now about the only offices left. They have a unique position in Paris, being recognized as the most important publicity agents the French can use. The French couturiers and these two magazines are in business together, in business to promote chic and keep the world of fashion spinning. As with the newspapers, there is a vast difference today in the amount of French news crowding the pages of Harper9 s Bazaar and Vogue. In the late '20's, ninety percent of the drawings and photographs were the work of the Parisian couturiers, often elaborate creations, which nobody ever wore anywhere. Now those pages are filled only with such French designs as actually come to America and are, for the most part, manufactured here. Many pages in both magazines are devoted to clothes created in America for American life. Many of the offices which worked from '25 to '29 for 74 American magazines have been closed. The Ladies Home Journal, the largest woman's magazine in the United States, now has no Paris office, and all because they hired a very bright lady as Fashion Editor about 1932. The lady had worked previously for a department store and also for Harper's Bazaar. She said she saw no reason why the Ladies Home Journal should maintain an expensive Paris office. She said that magazine catered to middle class American women who never actually saw a French original design. She thought her public was interested in news of what existed in fashion in America, whether it had been orig- inated in Paris or on Seventh Avenue. In 1926, however, America thought it needed Paris fash- ion news and Sylvestre, myself, and a hundred others were all busy supplying the need. We were doing our best to build up the French legend. When I had thoroughly mastered the business of writing Sylvestre's column for him so that he had literally nothing to do but draw down about $200 a week from the syndicate, I went at him about the store service. I explained to him that all the small department stores needed to know directly what was going on in the big center of fashion and that we were there to do it. At first Sylvestre wouldn't bite, but as he began to see the matter in terms of additional royalties, he reflected. He realized that he and only he could get confidential information from the big designers. He got worried about the stores not realizing the fact. Finally he became so in- trigued, he told me to go ahead and work out the form and content for the service. He would go to America to see that the Cosmos Syndicate sold it properly. I, therefore, began to compile short reports for stores. I made thumbnail sketches and resumeed everything weekly: 75 shoes, hats, bags, gloves, belts, clothes, colors. I indicated what was very new, less new, going out. Sylvestre got to New York and the thing began to sell. I was rather harassed because I had to continue turning out the fashion column and make an effort to cover the entire Paris market weekly for the store service. It wasn't more than a full time job, but I could have used a secretary. After about six weeks, Sylvestre returned triumphant. The store service, my brain child, had been sold to Lord and Taylor. Lord and Taylor already had a large office in Paris with plenty of employes who could tell them all. However, Sylvestre had convinced them about his private resources. I was so busy being appalled by Sylvestre's salesman- ship to Lord and Taylor, I forgot that some small stores out of New York had bought the service, too. I was so sick of writ- ing the horrible fashion story weekly, I decided the time had come for action. My action was quick. I found that Dorothy Shaver, a vice president of Lord and Taylor, was in Paris. I called upon her to make sure my ideas on the matter of the store service were right. She grimly agreed with me that I was correct. It was nothing for Lord and Taylor. I thereupon gave the idea to Sylvestre with my blessing and retired from the Cosmos Syndicate. I could retire gracefully because there was the New Yorker. One hundred and fifty dollars a month was enough to live on until something else came along. Writing news for the New Yorker was my favorite fashion job of all time. Even my nom de plume now gives me a small laugh. "Parasite." Some- one suggested it at a party given in honor of a brown dress suit, whose I don't recall. It epitomized the whole fashion business much better than I, in my innocence, realized. 76 Anyone who has ever written fashions will, I am sure, appreciate what it means to be allowed to write with no em- broidery just what you think about them. Practically nobody in Paris knew I wrote for the New Yorker. I never used it as an entree to see the collections until shortly before I quit the job. Not a soul on the New Yorker ever gave me a kind word during the three years I sent in my pieces. On the other hand, no one ever complained. The advertising department never raised its ugly head and said that if I thought Patou was no designer, I'd better keep still about it or someone would withdraw his advertising. After burbling for the New York Post, the Detroit Free Press, et al., that everything was divine, glamorous, chic, gorgeous, as Sylvestre had taught me, I would retire to the fastness of my own little apartment and tell the New Yorker readers that Molyneux was a good safe designer with not too much originality; that Patou thought he'd designed a coat if he put enough fox fur on it; that Talbot had her tongue in her cheek when she made baby bonnets. The New Yorker, ladies and gentlemen, is the only magazine I ever saw which had the guts to let its fashion reporters speak their minds. I expressed myself freely in its pages, and through those pages I was made to face facts from time to time. When the printed copy of the magazine came to me in Paris, along with some of my reports, I'd read L.L.'s comments on the new, oh so new, things I'd written up. Those jersey bathing suits which took my eye at Biarritz existed a whole year ago in the good old U.S.A., said Miss Long. Those daisy little sandals which Dufeau just put out were shown six months ago in Delman's. Patou's newest ten- 77 nis dress differed very little from one of Best and Co. last summer. Slowly an idea began to penetrate my mind. All beauti- ful clothes are designed in the houses of the French cou- turiers? Well. 78 Sffi astar of Qty A FTER clearing my head of the Cosmos Syndicate by dint jLJLof some very fast bicycling in Provence, I came back to Paris. It was March, 1927. 1 had acquired an apartment and a maid and was actually in no mood to live only on the New Yorker's money. 79 The previous fall when I was in New York, I had come upon a very conspicuous box in the New York Times one Sunday. R. H. Macy was advertising for a Stylist to send to their Paris office. I didn't know what a stylist was, but I knew I wanted a job in Paris. The ad said "Apply by letter only." I decided nothing would be lost by looking up a Macy's merchandising man who was a friend of a friend and thereby applying in person. I arrived bright and early Monday morning at Macy's on Thirty-fourth Street. I found my man. He turned out to be an old schoolmate of Jack Strauss. I was duly introduced to Mr. Strauss who, in turn, intro- duced me to one Mr. Meyer. Mr. Meyer was a very pleasant, small, thin, blue-eyed and speckled German about forty-five. He had begun his career as a ribbon clerk or something equally proverbial in Macy's. He had risen and risen. He had decided, finally, to retire. R. H. Macy didn't want him to retire. There is one thing to be said for that store, if they want you badly, they arrange to keep you somehow. Money for the salaries of Macy's ex- ecutives is plentiful. They arranged a compromise with Mr. Meyer whereby, since he wanted to live in Europe, he would take a part time job overseeing their Paris office. This brought up the fact that they had no Paris stylist. The word stylist is not definable because styling is a bastard art. It was one of those bright thoughts which flowered dur- ing the great prosperity. The department stores were in the money and their thoughts wandered to "good taste." Of course, before entering wholeheartedly into any such venture as actually hiring people to see that merchandise was in good taste, Macy's would normally test the idea. They made many studies throughout the store. They tried out good taste in rugs and fabrics, in pocket-books and dresses. Good 80 taste has never been adequately defined by anyone. Macy's never tried to define it to me. They simply said that they had put on a table in the fabric department several bolts of material. Some were in good taste, some bad. The public bought out the material in good taste first, Macy's said. It worked that way in all depart- ments. Always the public wanted what Macy's conceived of as good taste. The truth of the matter was very simple. Macy's had been doing an enormous business in cheap merchandise for generations. They employed a large number of buyers who had been there for years. The buyers were in a rut. They supplied the public with the same sort of thing they had bought fifteen years ago. Times change and the public taste changes along with them. Macy's buyers had been bringing home the bacon in profits all those years. Macy's wanted good taste if it was what sold, but they weren't going to fire a lot of tried and true money-makers. The idea was to employ professionals in "good taste," i.e., stylists. A stylist is not a buyer nor is she strictly a promotion artist. She was originally put in to urge the buyers to get newer merchandise, chic merchandise, smart merchandise. The stylist had very little authority over the buyer in most stores. Persuasion was her chief tool. At the height of styl- ing, in 1928, all stores in New York who had any pride at all had a stylist for every two or three departments. They saw to it that the departments contained things for the adver- tising manager to exploit. Mr. Meyer looked me over that wintry Monday morn- ing. I was dressed in black with two silver foxes. I had on the latest Descat hat. I had on my diamond ring. Mr. Strauss had introduced me. 81 After listening to the story of my life, I was immediately turned over to a bright young girl. The girl took me all around the store. We arrived first in the shoe department and she stopped in front of a show case. "Which shoe is in good taste and why?" she inquired. With my intimate knowledge of what the chic European made-to-order woman was wearing, I whipped out the an- swer. Ninety percent of the shoes were awful. Nobody wears shoes with extra trimming. Nobody wears walking shoes with French heels. Nobody wears shoes with round toes. I assured her, in the hat department, that nobody wore hats with anything but grosgrain ribbon for trimming. At the jewelry counter, I allowed that everyone was wearing heavy gilt modernistic jewelry and long strings of pearls. Nothing else except real jewels. The girl became more and more pleased. I told her what had been worn on the Riviera, at Cannes where I had not been last spring. She took me back to Mr. Meyer after an hour or so. On the way back, I asked her what she had been doing to me. She said it was a style test and that I was per- fect. The upshot of it all was that the job was reduced to two, me and another lady who really knew Mr. Strauss. I never saw her but I gathered she was older and chicer. Neither of us had ever been inside a department store before except to shop. We both, however, convinced Macy's that we had good taste. They hired the other lady and I went back to Paris for the New Yorker and my syndicate job. Naturally, when that blew up, my thoughts turned to Macy's. I took a long taxi ride, away from the Musee Rodin, be- hind which I lived, across the Seine, up through the Place Vendome, along the endless boulevards into that section 82 where I had not been since the old days of transporting Cha- nel's models. There, in the Citee Paradis, a cobble-stoned, dead-end street, was Macy's Paris office, a small stone building with a very high ceiling, light basement and two floors above it. The first floor contained many little offices, one beside the other. The top floor contained the "comptabilite," those desks full of bookkeeping and safes full of money, the offices of the French director of the office, and that of Mr. Meyer. Everything worked out fortuitously because the lady Macy's had hired in New York when I was after the job had just quit or been fired. I said I'd start at any salary they liked for a few weeks and we could see what happened. I was hired for $50 and an expense account per week. My duties, like those of the lady just demised were these : I was to report on Paris fashions to R. H. Macy in New York. That was my meat. I was to go out with New York buyers and prevent them from buying anything in bad taste. The buyers were to be told that they could only buy what I allowed them to buy. The price and quantity were their worry, the appearance mine. I was to descend every morn- ing on arrival at the Macy's Paris office to the basement. In the basement was all the merchandise previously bought by any Macy buyer in Paris. I had two little rubber stamps. One of them was marked "O.K." and had a space below for my name and a date. The other was marked "See letter No. xx" with a place for my name and a date. The first stylist had been given the right and duty of re- turning any merchandise which was purchased when her back was turned and which she considered to be in bad taste. It was easy to see why she lasted only three months. Mr. Meyer had then decided that it was preferable to ship the 83 bad taste merchandise but to have me write a letter explain- ing why I disapproved of it. The first two or three weeks I worked for Macy's were easy and I accomplished wonders. I organized all the fash- ion reports and had them mimeographed. I worked them out with sketches and resumeed them just as I had the Store Serv- ice Syndicate. Macy's were bowled over with the beauty and simplicity of that gesture. It looked like a hell of a lot of work and was sent in quantity so all the buyers in New York could have one. There was only one person in Macy's in New York who evidently resented all my trouble. It was a gentleman named Oswald Knauth. I hadn't met him at the time but I gathered he was pretty important and also very odd. He sent a brief message via Mr. Meyer to the effect that he never wanted any report sent to him of more than fifty words and that most of the time he thought fifty words was too long. Mr. Oswald Knauth is now the president of a large and important group of stores in the United States. I inspected merchandise and sent along word that it was all in terribly bad taste. There were no New York buyers around and life was pleasant. I realized that I'd better be a good girl. I took my expense account in hand and lunched at the Ritz and night-clubbed with the chic monde. After three weeks I had my salary doubled. Suddenly my first buyer from New York turned up. She was a jewelry buyer. We went out to buy together. The first place we went was filled with artificial pearls and rubies and diamonds made into necklaces, bracelets and what not. The buyer would pick up a necklace and say, "How do you like this one?" I always responded, "I think it's awful." 84 After fifteen minutes of that she said, "This is the line I sell the most of in New York." We were both quite desperate. I made a hasty decision. I decided that Macy's, whether they knew it or not, couldn't possibly be paying me $100 a week to ruin their jewelry de- partment. I said, "Why don't you just go ahead and buy whatever you want?" While she placed an order, I just smoked and looked out the window and began to wonder exactly what Macy's thought they were doing, hiring girls like me to tell their buyers what not to buy. I lasted seven months in the Macy's job. I attribute it to the fact that I adopted the same policy with all the buyers. I led them to what I had found that was chic in the Parisian sense. I urged them to buy at least a little of that. Then I went about with them and smoked a good deal while they got what they wanted. Part of my job as stylist was to buy samples of whatever I thought was exceptionally chic in Paris between onslaughts of the real buyer. I sampled things. Sampling means that you see hundreds of new bags, for instance, and buy one of whichever you like best. You send them on to New York in the fond hope that you will get a re- order to justify your original purchase. Buyers hate this sampling for two reasons. It's expensive: chic's the object and not price, and, more than likely, it's no use to the buyer because some manufacturer in New York has already gotten a sample and copied it. More important to the buyer, if she gets using your samples it may become obvious to the mer- chandising man, her immediate boss, that she might as well just stay in New York and let some resident buyer or stylist do her foreign buying. Whenever I got particularly bored with sampling in 85 Macy's Paris office, I found it a good idea to betake myself to some resort to see what was going on there. One thing must be said for my experience with R. H. Macy. Once they had hired me, they let me do my job as I saw it, entirely and with- out interference. When we got so we saw the job differently, they fired me. My first resort trip was Biarritz. All the fashion report- ers went down. I told Mr. Meyer I thought I'd better go down. He agreed that where went the chic monde, there should I follow. If Macy's didn't know at once what was worn in chic European spring resorts, how could they hope to do a good summer business? I had my first experience, in Biarritz, of leading the chic life. I went to the right beach to swim although there were three others much nicer. I went to drink afterward at the right bar, at the right hour. I went gambling when I was supposed to gamble, and danced when I was supposed to dance. I was lucky because, although I was a reporter, I had a boy friend. Most of the reporters were wandering around, gaunt, grim, and alone, observing like mad. They were a great help to me. After a couple of drinks, I usually relaxed my vigilance and concentrated on Chemin de Fer. I made quite a lot of money gambling. The next day, on the beach, I'd sidle up to another re- porter and she'd tell me who wore what at the Casino last night. After just two days, I found I could lead my own life. I went to my first bull fight, at San Sebastien just over the Spanish border. I stopped going to the beach because, al- though it was the season, it was frightfully cold. I borrowed a car and took another reporter motoring along the coast to St. Jean and decided that if I ever had to 86 come to Biarritz to observe the chic monde again, I would go directly to St. Jean. After a week of it, I went back to Paris. I tended to my buyers until it got to be June and I had to go to England be- cause there were the races at Ascot. Later, I had to go to Le Touquet for Macy's news, and because a group of friends were driving down anyway. Came July and the dress buyers. I was sent off to Vienna with one of them, one of those who had been at Macy's for the last fifteen years. We got on the train one night to go to Vienna. She didn't have a book or a magazine. She just sat for twenty-three hours. We were supposed to look into the Vienna market to see whether or not, as rumored, one could now buy dresses there. We arrived on a weekend and it became the duty of a little Viennese boy from the office to escort us about the city, sight- seeing on Sunday. We had a car. It stopped outside a large cathedral. The boy asked the buyer, who was my senior in every way, whether she would care to get out and see the church. "Is it your best church," she inquired, "because if it isn't, I don't think I want to bother." Later, at lunch, he was chattering along and said, "I read a good deal of American poetry, in translation of course. Have you ever read Walt Whitman?" "Why should I read Walt Whitman," the buyer wanted to know. "I'm a dress buyer." I had my first airplane flight, back from Vienna at Macy's expense. And I had one really practical idea for them. In Vienna I found that handknit sweaters cost about $3.00. In Paris, Schiaparelli was just beginning to have some success with her handknits. She worked in her little first-floor apart- 87 ment and all the chic women paid her $12 for her sweaters with their modernistic designs. Macy's, of course, I had forced to get a few. They were so chic. Even I realized, however, that they were a little ex- pensive to resell. The French head of the office and I discussed my idea and he authorized me to obtain some modern sweater designs in Paris and send them to Vienna to be copied at $3.25. Nothing came of it in New York. Apparently modernistic designs on sweaters at $12 retail were not in good taste for Macy's in 1927. Those were the only designs I ever had copied for Macy's. Of course, we, like every other resident office, sam- pled plenty of things which we suspected were never to be re-ordered but only to be copied. Our problem in such sam- pling was to beat down the manufacturer on the price of the sample by all but promising him that we would get a re-order. Mr. Meyer suggested to me that he knew I'd been a sketcher and that I might come through for Macy's but la politesse forbade his forcing the issue. I told him this type of work no longer interested me. The methods of the good buyers were more profitable to some department stores than either sampling or stealing. One handkerchief buyer I knew, for instance, had such a system for beating down the French manufacturers that I am sure they couldn't basically afford to sell to her at all. She would start by getting the price per dozen. She would then take the price per dozen dozen, compare the two, and get the first price reduced. She would then go off into dozen dozen dozens and get the price reduced again. She would then assure the manufacturer that everyone in New York fol- lowed her store's buyers and that he was not in any position to refuse her anything. When she left any given handkerchief manufacturer, he had sold her thousands of handkerchiefs and probably lost a half a cent on every one. By the time I'd been five months with Macy's, I did vir- tually nothing but report fashions. As I saw each new buyer from New York, I established some sort of contact which always ended by seeing her point of view and not only let- ting her buy what she wanted, but also ceasing in large part to send her samples. I was bored to death but $100 a week was so many French francs I couldn't see quitting and reducing my stand- ard of living back to New Yorker levels. And at last, in the seventh month, my boss fired me by letter from New York. It was the happiest day of my life, bar none. Designing was what I had come to Paris to learn. I'd learned a lot but I hadn't designed a dress except for myself. I had watched American manufacturers steal and the de- partment stores buy. They all got the same thing. I was still sold on the fact that they all had to have fashions from Paris. I decided to go back to New York and sell some department store the idea of letting me design clothes in Paris and send them back. The point was that, being in Paris, I would have the French trend in design. The store which hired me would have a different version of the trend from any other store. Back in New York, I talked to Altman, who didn't know what I was getting at, and to Lord and Taylor, who didn't care what I was getting at. I decided to work for Lord and Taylor and show them. Lord and Taylor had just planned a whole bureau of stylists in Paris. It seemed to me that somehow by working in the bureau I'd find a chance to design for them. The lady who was to head the Paris styling bureau had left for Paris. I followed her over and got hired for $40 a week and an expense account. 89 I keep mentioning the expense account because it was important in Paris. It made it possible for you to live free all day and have a really clear salary. As a stylist, it was necessary to be out in the town looking up chic most of the time and taxis were the only quick way of getting about. As a stylist it was necessary to go to chic places. The expense account could pay for most of one's food and all of one's traveling. Nobody mentioned my designing in Lord and Taylor's Paris office. I was given a desk in a row of five. The head stylist had an office to herself. There were three others, an- other young American girl, much like myself, a youth who had worked for Lord and Taylor in New York, an older American lady who had lived for years in Paris. The older American lady had been the only Paris stylist for Lord and Taylor but, I gathered, had not fully realized the necessity for more and more and more fashion from the center of style. The fashion staff was completed by a French secretary and myself. I had been over the bumps in Macy's Paris office and knew a good deal about the Paris market. The Paris market is not only all the big dressmakers but also all the designers of hats, bags, gloves and what not, and, last but not at all least, the manufacturers of toilet accessories, boxes, hand- kerchiefs and their cases, jewelry, everything to make the women happy. There were also all the Paris decorators. Macy's had had a modern furniture show before I worked for them and Lord and Taylor were very, very decoration-conscious. I had a rather annoying incident when I was fired from Macy's. My address book disappeared from my desk where I left it the day I was fired. When I came back to collect it 90 the next day, there it wasn't. It contained the addresses of everyone from whom Macy's bought. The idea is that one store can have sources of which no other store knows. This is of course all sheer nonsense. The minute any manufacturer in any town sells anything to any- body, he instantly notifies all the other stores and tries to frighten them into buying something too. When I got the Lord and Taylor job, I wanted my old address book quite badly. It had taken me months to make it and it meant retracing the same ground. Of course, nobody in the Macy's office ever had the foggiest idea where the book could possibly have gone. I finally found my old secretary who had also been fired from Macy's. She immediately said she was so sorry she hadn't informed me before, but that of course in her thorough way of providing for the future she had always kept a copy of my addresses for herself. She made me a new copy of my book so my life in L and T started smoothly. We all worked more or less on everything. I was specifi- cally given the decorating departments. It was fun working for Lord and Taylor. Somehow there wasn't the pressure one felt in Macy's. We none of us got much money but there were six to do what I had been supposed to do alone at Macy's. All the people were consequently more human. The head of the styling office kept pretty busy. She didn't like Paris and always refused to eat where she thought it was dirty. She didn't speak French much. The older lady, who had always lived in Paris, had a fixed social life. She under- stood pretty clearly what she was supposed to do and took it quite seriously. I found myself with a couple of healthy young Ameri- cans who had never worked in Paris before, eager to learn all about the great world of style. I taught them all I knew 91 and we got our jobs so boiled down that we never had to work more than half a day, sometimes not even that. I knew all the sources and we just split up what we had to see to, working singly or in pairs as seemed advisable. The idea was not like the French, that life is leisurely and work may be done slowly. We did all our work with the utmost speed so that in one day we could easily do three days' tasks. For instance, I thought it would be nice for Lord and Taylor to have some fine modern rugs. It only took me one day and many taxis to notify a few designers that I wanted rug designs. I could have spent two weeks doing it. Then it took me another couple of days to collect the designs, get prices on possible execution in Paris, make up a report and send it all into the head office in New York. The disturbing part of it was that no word ever came back from the head office of any of the work we actually ac- complished. Just what happened to it, I don't know to this day. We only tracked down one case to its finish. The youth and I thought that a set of modern monograms would be nice for the men's department. We got an allow- ance of $50 to have them made up. We got a friend of mine, a painter, to work on them. This consumed many many days with trips to the painter's studio, long discussions, drinks. Finally the monograms were completed and sent over, we thought for Christmas handkerchiefs. A year later when the boy returned to New York to work in the store there, he ascertained that the monograms had never been used. He looked about and found them — under a blotter on someone's desk. It was fundamentally discouraging, getting up an idea, working it out, and never hearing another word about it. It was an easy pleasant life leading to nothing but cafes on the left bank where we went for breakfast after reporting for 92 work at nine. True, after breakfast we went on to a box manu- facturer and got whole new sets of closet boxes made up for some buyer to see and order on when she arrived. She either didn't arrive or didn't order. Somehow it was just too far from Paris to New York. The ideas got lost en route. We never knew whether some- thing had already been done in New York. We never knew whether it was cheaper to do it in New York or Paris. We had the same old Macy's trouble, the buyers didn't want us. Lord and Taylor's buyers didn't need us much either, because they weren't so old nor so set as the Macy buyers. They probably even read Walt Whitman like their custom- ers, some of them. The Paris stylist had a bastard job. The New York stylist was nearer the heart of things, but she had a bastard job too. No buyer wanted her. She was just another salary to the merchandising man. If the buyer couldn't supply what the store thought the public wanted, having an attractive girl at hand with large ideas on what was smart didn't solve the problem. The point is: the stylist didn't have any better taste than anyone else. The stylist was supposed to have newer taste. Maybe she did have newer taste, but there was nothing to prove she could figure out what the majority of women wanted, because she had been to a good school and afterward done her time in European art galleries. The department stores discovered a lot of this when the depression came. I think that most of them discovered it is the job of the buyer to know both her figures on sales and profits and the general level of the public taste. No store can afford to get above the general level of its public's taste. They just lose their customers. The problem of the depart- ment store is to keep exactly even with changing taste. What the chic European woman wears where she goes is 93 of minimum importance to a department store buyer. The clientele of R. H. Macy and Lord and Taylor is not com- posed of chic women. Chic women don't give bridge parties. They don't go to the matinee. They aren't faced with that problem of what to wear to dinner when the men don't dress. The buyers knew all that. But the stores were rich and the public had money to spend. The advertising departments wanted glamour to pile on. They spent hundreds of thou- sands of dollars building the French legend. Not only dresses, but everything that a woman bought, used, wore, was supposedly designed in Paris. The department stores of the United States made an enormous capital investment in the names of the French couturiers. Lord and Taylor's and other Paris style bureaus died a natural death when the depression cut down spending. Long before that, I left it. I only stayed with Lord and Taylor four months, in fact. I saw that nobody had the faintest intention of letting me give my version of the current style in clothes. The stores weren't a bit embarrassed in 1927 by all having the same clothes to sell. They liked it. The stylist was flourishing. There was plenty of money to pay her. Everything in fashion was bigger and better and more French every hour. Main Bocher, then the Paris editor of Vogue, offered me a job on his magazine. 94 uttina, inning an a raping / I SAID very clearly to myself what I thought of Seventh Ave- nue but I didn't want to be convinced. One reason was that I needed very badly to earn money outside to pay for 67th Street. The other reason was that I'd just begun to suspect what mass production of clothes might mean. 263 What the mass production of clothes did mean ninety- nine times out of a hundred was reinforced in my mind, after I resigned from Nibs in April of 1934, by Marshall Field and Co. They wanted to push off a new wholesale dress busi- ness and hired me to come to Chicago for a working week and do six models. I went — for $1,000 clear profit which I needed. I was not hopeful. The head of that dress business was not tall or worried like Mr. Nibs. He was small, but he was strong and tough. He wanted dresses to retail for $10.95 and that was that. Quality was necessarily secondary and also style if it meant more than 25 cents' worth of trimming. I spent most of the time I was in Chicago having my pic- ture taken and being interviewed and taken to lunch with executives and fashion writers. That was why I was being paid. The clothes were not important. They could find some designs somewhere. I got six about finished between photog- raphers and came back home. One of my stipulations in working for them had been that the clothes were not to be sold with my name except where I consented. That made no difference to the new dress business head. My agreement was only oral anyway. They not only sold my name to a store in New York by whom I didn't care to be advertised, but the advertised dresses looked so different from my original conception that I was person- ally unable to recognize them as my designs. It is almost impossible for me to get into print what I feel when I look at a dress which is obviously made of a material that you could shoot peas through, that has no shape of any kind, but just a belt around the waist so the customer can pretend it fits there, the whole topped by some disgusting trimming which has been added without reference to the line of the dress, which doesn't exist in any case. 264 My soul curdles. My stomach turns over eight times per second. My spine tightens and I vomit mentally. I don't mind seeing people in those clothes because I know that most of the time it's all they can get for their price. I mind seeing advertisements for those atrocities and that's what I saw in the ad of one of New York's largest stores, one fine day, with my name attached to it. "That'll be about all of that, Hawes," I said to myself* "You got your blood money and I hope it was worth it to you. In the future there will be no more wholesale clothes for you until such a time as you, personally, yourself, can see to it that they turn out entirely and absolutely beautiful, durable, and functional." At the same time I made the dress arrangements with Marshall Field, I talked them into letting me have a try at really doing fabrics for them. I don't hold the dress affair much against Marshall Field and Co. The gentleman with whom I had most of my dealings, the head of all their whole- sale businesses, was an extremely nice man. Every time he said, "Design a dress," I said yes, if I can do fabrics. The cotton fabrics I'd helped them promote had been merely by means of my dress designs. I wanted to get at the actual material. Moreover once I thought that the American fabric man- ufacturers would one day use me as the French fabric manu- facturers use the French couturiers. Eventually the event may come to pass. Perhaps one day some American Bian- chini will get together with some American Rodier or Du- charne and they will begin to back an American couture. At the moment, as I discovered, it is not necessary for American fabric manufacturers to back me or any of the American retail designers. This is not for the reason indi- cated by Mr. Kraemer. Whatever kind of fools we may be, 265 our foolishness will not see us through the next major de- pression without help. I think that by the time that depression starts, there will undoubtedly be an American couture to be backed. At the moment, there is not. However, our mere existence will not get us our backing, but economic necessity. Not our economic necessity, but that of the American fabric manu- facturers. Just at the moment, and for many years back, the Amer- ican fabric manufacturers have a free source of design, a free try-out for fabrics, a free publicity agency. The arrange- ments of the French manufacturers with the French cou- turiers serve to supply all of these things to American man- ufacturers. The American fabric man just sits and waits to see what is going to prove good in France. Then he gets himself a little piece of it and copies. The system of selling American fabrics on Seventh Ave- nue is very simple. A salesman comes in and opens his brief case. "Here is a material," he says, "that you will want to buy. It is a copy of something which Molyneux used this sea- son. It is $2.35 a yard. Of course, it is expensive but it is pure silk. It's exactly like the French import." When it first began to happen to me, I used to nearly jump out of my skin with rage. "It's nothing to me what Molyneux uses," I'd snap. "Besides that, what business have you got copying it?" The smarter Seventh Avenue fabric salesmen got so they didn't tell me what they were showing me, but that didn't make any difference. I had always seen, or bought, and used the French fabrics. I'd recognize the copies of them, one after the other, sometimes almost as quickly as I'd seen them uptown, more often a few months later. I am now just sitting and quietly waiting for the day 266 when the source of fabric design from France will be cut off. It will be a sad day for France, and for the world, be- cause when it happens, Flanders Field will be populated with freshly dead men again. The French will be fighting the Germans or the English or themselves. And eventually we will be in it too. Before we get into it, the American fabric manufacturers will be having good business. They will be needing someone to tell them what to make next. They'll be coming around for little confabs with American designers who know whether they want soft materials, or stiff ones, whether it should be dull or shiny, rough or smooth. They have little confabs with me from time to time now. Sometimes it's free, sometimes I get paid. Usually it's free because I can't help them now as much as the French can — and they get it free anyway. Marshall Field paid me for learning how little use I could be to a fabric manufacturer who must immediately sell millions and millions of yards of each thing. Marshall Field is not just a department store in Chicago. Marshall Field is an enormous organization of manufacturers who sell to each other and to the Field retail store and other retail stores. One day in May 1934, after I had quit N. H. Nibs, I gathered together my thoughts on summer materials and set out on a train for Carolina and the fabric mills of Mar- shall Field. The ideas were not for that summer, but for the next summer, fourteen long months away. It takes an endless amount of time to get the first small hand-woven samples of a fabric. Some of the hand-woven samples are then selected to be made by machine. Finally the machine samples are completed. Corrections and recon- struction are suggested. Ultimately the sample pieces are 267 completed, and must be shown early in February for the next summer's clothes. I had a very nice time in Carolina. I went down with a couple of men from the Field Fabric office. There was to be a meeting to discuss fabrics from many angles. We were met by a car which motored us miles to a couple of small towns. Marshall Field mill towns. I was taken through the mills to keep me amused and presently we drove away to our final destination, a lodge high on the hill above one of the towns. It was long and low and ram- bling, brown, shingled and thoroughly comfortable. The view was lovely. Away down in the valley were the mills, scarcely visible through the trees. Across the valley were the mountains of Virginia. A meeting began. Those present being the heads of the mills, the gentlemen with whom I had traveled down, and myself. There was some burning problem which couldn't be kept down. We started to talk about fabrics but soon the discussion was off into a bout between the Field mill heads and the gentleman who bought goods from them for Marshall Field in Chicago. I stayed in the room as long as I thought permissible and garnered some interesting information. The mills sold to Marshall Field retail store at a discount, a lower price than they sold other retailers. Therefore, it was not profitable for the Marshall Field mills to sell to the Marshall Field store. Therefore the quarrel: the buyer for the store just ordered and ordered but he never got any material delivered to him. The mill heads were supposed to run their mills at a profit for the owners, and it was not profitable for them to sell to the store the owners also owned. It all appealed to me as one of the more amusing angles on crisis in big industry. I spent two days in Carolina on 268 a $200 a day rate and most of the time I was out of the con- ferences because they were none of my business. I spent about an hour explaining my ideas to the as- sembled multitude, telling them what I thought would be good for next summer on the basis of what I had used and was using and would want to use. They were polite and even interested. But they had only one answer to everything. "We can't go into production on anything we aren't sure we're going to sell a million yards of." I saw them deciding what they would go into production on. They kept showing me little swatches of material which I'd seen before for, let us say, $1.50 a yard. "How do you like that?" they'd ask. "It's okay, but it's already in existence," I answer. "We can put it out for $1.00 a yard," they'd say, and put it in the pile for sample making. I didn't have any samples for them to copy. I had a lot of samples to explain that here was a certain rough yarn in this silk which, if it could be duplicated in cotton, should give a texture such as would probably be desirable for that summer fourteen months away. Of course, the silk was too thin, the cotton weave should be tighter, and so on. I gave them all my samples and thoughts in written form. I came home to New York. Some months later, one of them showed up with some samples. I couldn't recognize any one of my ideas but there among the samples was an exact copy of a silk sample which I'd taken along because the twist in the yarn was new and would produce something different by way of texture how- ever it was woven. I had my usual moment of horror at see- ing a copy, intensified this time by thinking I was inadvert- ently responsible. Very quickly, the gentleman said, "Oh, we aren't going 269 to put that in the line. I know we told you we wouldn't copy anything you brought. I don't know why they made it." I don't think they did put it in the line. They probably found they couldn't produce it for a dollar. Anyway, it all came to nothing except that I saw I was no good to them. I wanted them to make sample pieces and let me use them for a season after which time, I would know whether the fabric was right or wrong, whether it wore, whether the customers liked the way it felt and hung. This is the step between the first sample piece of a fabric and the weaving of thousands of yards of the fabric. This trial period is carried on in France for the French fabric manufacturer by the Parisian couturiers to the small extent that is necessary in a country which does its mass produc- tion for export only. The trial period for most fabrics manufactured in Amer- ica is carried on by the French fabric manufacturer and the French couturier at no expense to the American manufac- turer. The American fabric manufacturer scarcely recog- nizes the necessity of a trial on a fabric. He does not under- stand it. He accepts a successful French fabric as a fait accompli, ready for him to copy in millions of colors and millions of yards. If you talk to American fabric manu- facturers about trying out fabric they are either bored or horrified at the slowness of procedure, the necessity for mak- ing those few yards. Never will I forget, long ago, 1930 or 1931, the scan- dalized face of an American gentleman who asked me how to put a new fabric on the market. He walked into my shop with a small and unusual piece of brocade in his pocket. "Where did you get that?" I asked. "We made it all ourselves," he said. "We had the idea and worked it out." 270 "I didn't know there were any machines for making that sort of thing in America," said I, under the shadow of the French legend. "We've got plenty of them," he said. "We make a lot of stuff for the French manufacturers here. You know, copy their materials for them so they don't have to pay duty." "Really?" "Sure. Nobody ever questioned it while the old man was running the business. But now the boys have come in. They keep saying we ought to put the stuff on the market ourselves. We took this piece of material to one of the French houses and showed it to them. They offered to take all we could make." "Well, why don't you sell it to them?" "We asked them what they'd resell it for and they said $7.50 a yard. We could sell it for $4.00, but we'd be under- cutting their trade. The boys think we ought to do something about it anyway." "Why don't you?" "We don't know how to start" "The first thing you do is sell some to Hattie Carnegie or Bergdorf. You can charge them five or six dollars if you want. We can't buy anything like that less than seven. Then, after they've used it a season, you'll have a little press on it. Arrange to get it into Vogue or Harper's Bazaar. See that some well-dressed women get circulating around in it where they'll be seen." I ran through the French system for him. He began to look a little depressed. "We won't get any volume that way," he said. "No, but don't you see, after the first season when the wholesalers have become acquainted with the material, you'll be able to sell it to them. You can drop the price for 271 them since they'll use more. That's how you have to go about putting across a new fabric." "It'll take an awful long time," he sighed. "Six months to a year," I agreed. "And then someone will copy it," he said. Then someone would copy it, I knew too. We looked bit- terly at one another and reflected on our great competitive system. "Can't you register it?" I asked. "You can register a print but you can't register a weave," he said. "I guess we better sell it to the French." You can register a print design and sue anyone who copies it. It works fairly satisfactorily, although even that game can be beaten. No satisfactory system for registering a weave has yet been developed. Occasionally an American fabric man goes to France and gets a sample length of a print which he rushes back to America and registers as his design before the French have gotten it registered here for themselves. The dress fabric business is a worthy base for the Ameri- can dress business. It ekes out a rather unprofitable existence in a parasitical way. It begins by stealing ideas and then competes with itself like mad on the question of price. It runs hither and thither to avoid the unions. It goes into bank- ruptcy. It begins over again. Because there are too many manufacturers in it, the chance for existence lies in finding some way to beat the game, put your competitor out of busi- ness, undersell him. Often it seems a pity the manufacturers can't take a tip from those hated unions, "In unity there is strength." Of course, they try to get together, but that extra little dollar they might make by being lone wolves always throws their mutual benefit societies out of whack. The mill heads of Marshall Field aren't going to lose five 272 cents a yard by cooperating with the retail store of Marshall Field. Meanwhile, none of them are going to bother paying the rent for Hawes Inc. because its services are not required. One steals what one can, and buys only the rest. At any rate, I said to myself after the Marshall Field fabric lesson, it only took me two days to find out I have to rely mostly on myself if I want to be a couturiere in America. But, you see, the overhead at 67th Street was still too big to be covered by the customers' orders at prices they could afford. Everywhere from $125 to $350, my prices were. Every season, my sales went up 25%, regular like clockwork, every season I lost less money. I thought to expand the sales a little by carrying a few more things and that is the way I got into the knitting busi- ness. I have always loved and admired and worn simple, well- made English sweaters. I get bored with the colors but I never get tired of the shapes and the softness. It didn't occur to me that such sweaters were not made in the United States. I wanted to get some to sell at Hawes Inc. in the colors I chose. I found there were none to be had. So I said, okay, I will have some made. In my quest for a maker, I was hired for a knitting job. As far as the actual job went, suffice it to say that I couldn't run a knitting machine, but from the little I saw nobody has ever half exploited that bit of steel. Knitted clothes are usually a horror to behold with their drooping behinds. They're comfortable and they sell in spite of their bagginess. They can actually fit because of the stretch. Some- day— oh some day, some real designer is going to spend a few years with a knitting machine and turn out something thoroughly satisfactory in mass production. In the meantime, we have no time for experimenting, 273 no free time, I mean. We are in business to make money. I was hired to produce something new in the way of sweaters, although their basic shape had already been perfected as far as I could tell. I got Miss Dodge, my old classmate and the warden of Vassar, to collect a group of what she considered the best sweater girls on the campus to consider the matter of some- thing new in sweaters with me. I traveled to Poughkeepsie to consult with them. They were a very attractive set of girls. As I looked them over, I perceived that they had all gotten themselves up in honor of the occasion. One had on a white turtle-necked sweater. Another wore a red sweater with a small round neck. A third had on a crew- necked Brooks model. And the fourth and the fifth and the sixth had on different colors of the same models. "How do you like your sweaters?" I asked. "We love them," they responded all at once. "Can you think of any improvements that could be made?" I inquired. 'Wo/* they asserted firmly. I tried for an hour and a half to make them tell me some- thing they would like to have in the way of a sweater, some- thing new, something different. There wasn't a thing they wanted. They wore sweaters nine-tenths of the time and they were perfectly satisfied. They would only concede that possibly there might be other and more exciting colors from time to time. I left them. I had discovered exactly what I feared. Sweaters were quite satisfactory. The only thing I could think of to help them out was to make a sweater that was knitted to button in back. They were all wearing their Brooks coat-sweaters back-side-to and had great gaps over their fannies. I tried to make my knitter 274 do a double-fannied sweater, so it would cross and button securely over the tail in the rear. He thought I was mad. Maybe I was. Anyway he shortly pointed out to me that there was no sense of his paying me money to tell him to make a sweater with a two-and-two rib instead of no rib, or to rib it up to the breasts instead of just to the waist. He wanted me to revolu- tionize the sweater industry. What I wanted him to do was make classic sweaters in wonderful colors. Far from doing that, I spent most of my time telling him what I'd told Nibs. His knitted things didn't fit. "There isn't any use of my designing anything for you until you can make the sizes right," I'd shout. I got out six size fourteen skirts one day and showed him that not one of them measured the same in any particular He just said, "Design something new. I have a production man. You are a designer" Over and over again, the wholesale trade's idea of a designer is some mythical and impractical creature who turns out something new under any and all circumstances, regardless of fit. The knitter paid me $100 a week and wouldn't even listen to the simple facts of life which I could explain even if I had become convinced that sweaters didn't need designing. As Brooks Bros, have been quietly proving for the last twenty years, the sweater business doesn't need to be rev- olutionized. It just needs a new color and a new weave from time to time, and even that isn't vital. Brooks Bros, have been taking the entire output of a number of mills in Scot- land for decades. Brooks Bros, aren't even mentioned in the fashion world. They are considered quite, quite unimportant. Fash- ion has not been able to persuade them to give up something 275 good for the doubtful added profits on something different. Nor has fashion been able to persuade thousands of col- lege girls, as freshmen or graduates, that there is any point in buying anything but a perfectly simple and functional sweater. All of these little excavations of mine in the mass produc- tion world began to have meaning and by the spring of 1935, I saw the bones of that world laid bare. 276 21 Wtrih IN THE spring of 1935 there happened a lucky accident which paid almost all my rent for over a year and a half. The accident was due to two things. The first thing was the result of having made a few friends for myself during my Seventh Avenue experiences. 277 One of them was a shop named Dewees in Philadelphia. Dewees didn't sell any quantity of Hawes clothes but they made a fuss about them for promotion's sake, and were pleasant people. When I stopped doing wholesale, they expressed their regret. I didn't want to let them down. I therefore contracted to do a few accessories for them so that they could continue to advertise my name. Among other things which I gave them in the spring of 1935 was a glove which buttoned on the back. They put me in touch with a wholesale glove man and I made a rather loose arrangement with him whereby he was probably to give me a royalty if the glove happened to sell to other stores. We had nothing in writing. I gave him two or three glove models and forgot the entire transaction. In the meantime, the other half of the accident was taking place. The Lucky Strike advertising was managed by the firm of Lord and Thomas. The method of getting pictures for the ads was to take dozens of them and then throw away those and take another dozen until finally one appeared which pleased the agency and the advertiser. Because a friend of mine worked there, they took pic- tures of my clothes from time to time. I was never particu- larly keen on the idea because I don't think ladies who wear Hawes clothes care to see those clothes in cigarette advertis- ing. However, mostly in the spirit of friendship and because my friend kept assuring me that some day something would come of it — just what, I never knew — I lent Lord and Thomas things to photograph. In November, 1934, they took a pink suede jacket and a pair of pink suede gloves to match it. The gloves had orig- inally been the idea of my hat designer. She had designed a pair for herself and had them made in England in the '20's. In 1931, when we were first beginning to dabble with 278 accessories, she brought in this very simple glove. It re- sembled in every way the usual one button glove except for one fact: it buttoned on the back of the wrist instead of the front. I liked it and we had a pair made up in red suede which clinched the idea. Colored gloves didn't exist in those days. We always kept a sample on hand and took a few orders every season. By 1934, 1 saw no reason why the Lucky Strike people shouldn't use the glove if they liked. I figured it was no more use to us. And the photograph would probably never be used. It was this same glove which I gave to Dewees via Mr. Postman, the glove manufacturer. Suddenly in April, my friend at Lord and Thomas called me up and said, "Do something quickly. Your glove is com- ing out in the May Lucky Strike ads and you must merchan- dise it at once." The reason she wanted it merchandised was because maybe you once heard of a Camel Hat. Maybe you heard of the Lucky Strike Glove. When something is put on the market which appears simultaneously in a cigarette ad, the cigarette gets a lot of extra advertising free. The stores are apt to hop onto the merchandise for promotion because it is already on the backs of half the magazines in the United States. I have become progressively lazy where mass merchan- dising of Hawes articles is concerned. Usually when the smoke has cleared away, I find I've made $45.50 on a royalty and it isn't worth the effort. Had it not been that the glove was already manufactured by Postman, I'd probably never have even called up anyone. But I did call Postman up and explained all to him. The lady from Lord and Thomas also explained all to him and gave him reprints of the ad which was to appear and 279 lots of good advice. It was a wonderful picture of the glove, that ad. The whole center of the picture was one hand with a back-buttoned pink suede glove holding a cigarette. The most remarkable part of this story is that Mr. Post- man never tried to trip me up for one single instant. He had the glove and I had no contract with him. He proceeded to make one with me, giving me a five percent royalty. He pro- moted the glove to the stores, which were delighted. It is not often a glove department has anything particular to attract the public attention. One of the stores which bought it sent for their first gloves by airplane. Mr. Postman, although a quiet man, knew his business. He wasn't particularly used to promotions but he just used his head. He had something and he knew it. He gave a pref- erence of just two days to one store in every town so that they could break the news that they had the glove exclusively, the Elizabeth Hawes "Guardsman" glove, as seen in the Lucky Strike ad. After two days, the glove was released to any other stores which Postman saw fit to sell. We all went to town, on that old glove which had come out of England five years before. For years and years there hadn't been a ladies' glove which buttoned on the back. Maybe there never had. I retained the rights to the glove exclusively for Hawes Inc. in New York for a very simple reason. We were selling the glove in suede, hand-made, for $12.50. It cost us $6 and we took our usual mark-up to cover the overhead. Mr. Postman put out the glove in cotton to retail for $1.95. This was probably the most expensive cotton glove that had appeared for years. Mr. Postman figured he must use an expensive imported cotton fabric in order to make it look like the suede in the picture. He also said that suede 280 gloves did not sell in the spring. He also said he could al- ways cut the price later. He pleaded with me to release the glove for New York. I just sat down and figured out that for every pair I sold hand- made at $12.50, 1 made $6 toward the rent. If I let out the cheap version in New York, I couldn't continue to sell my version. I would make $6 on every seventy-two pairs sold in New York on my five percent royalty. I stuck to my point. Finally I released the glove in the summer after my season was over and it was still good enough news for Lord and Taylor to run an ad saying they had it. From May to November, I garnered in from $500 to $700 a month on royalties from this glove. I thought it was one of the greatest jokes of all time. Mr. Postman decided it would be a good idea to make me an employe. Usually I negotiate all my contracts myself. I know I lose money that way, but I feel better about it. This time I left the negotiations to my manager. The pleasant young man who had helped me to electrify the wholesale dress world and move into 67th Street had left. I had a very tough guy for manager during 1935. I was trying this and that to see how one made expensive couturiere houses pay their way. The tough guy made a contract for me to design gloves for Postman for $500 a month for one year. I dropped open my mouth when he told me but I figured Mr. Postman must know his business. If I had been on hand at the time the arrangements were made, I would probably have pointed out that it is only once every decade that a break like the Guardsman glove occurs. A glove is a small thing. It goes onto a certain definite object called a hand for the purpose of covering it and keep- ing it warm or clean. There are not very many things one can do to the small covering in question. The hand must be 281 able to move in the glove. A shape has been devised so that this is possible when the leather or fabric used in the glove is stretchy enough. The most satisfactory glove has already been designed. It is a simple pull-on. It may button at the wrist to give a slim look. It usually has little lines on the back because it is as- sumed that ladies want their hands to look long and thin. A glove designer can play around all she likes trying to make a new glove. A majority of the gloves sold will re- main the basic version. This is not only the experience of Mr. Postman, for whom I worked, but of several other glove manufacturers whom he specifically asked. All of them re- ported that what they call classic gloves always outsold any other type of glove they showed. The glove designer's lot is, therefore, not a happy one. As a glove designer, if you aren't going to perpetrate a hor- ror, your designing must consist in simply doing something slightly more amusing with the perfected form of a glove. As anyone can see, most glove designers are engaged in ruining the basic shape of their article by blurring it with God knows what in the way of trimming and cutting and sew- ing. This is the result of the vast endeavor on the part of the manufacturer to meet the demand of the department store for "something new." That the public makes no such de- mand is amply proven in the case of gloves. The public wants good simple gloves. And for the most part they buy good simple gloves. The fact that we buttoned the glove on the back gave the public something just a spot different to buy. It in no way interfered with the function or simplicity of the glove. Mr. Postman was a very wise man in some ways. He never harassed us for more and more designs. He said to just go ahead and send along something when we had an 282 idea. This was the millennium in outside jobs for Hawes Inc. Mr. Postman had a glove designer at the factory in Gloversville who sat all day every day making new kinds of trimming and stitching and edging and tucking and lacing and gloves which few human beings would ever really want. Of course, they sold in a small way because women go and look for new gloves and often make the mistake of buy- ing something rather fancy which they afterwards regret. Ninety percent of the effort in designing new gloves is lost. One of the bad points about Mr. Postman's arrangements with me was that, in a world of promotion, he spent money to get a name and something to promote and then he didn't spend another cent to promote it. I do not mean to say that in a sane world, any of this would be necessary. In a sane world, Mr. Postman, who makes as good gloves as can bought, would continue to make the same gloves year after year, of good quality at a fair price. He would probably hire someone like me to give him ten new ideas a year. Those ten ideas would be culled from the forty or fifty that three or four ingenious Hawes em- ployes produced without too great an effort. If we didn't have more than three decent thoughts on gloves, then Mr. Postman would be content with those and so would the pub- lic. Some of the ideas would be as startling as just button- ing a short glove with an old-fashioned underclothes button. We did that at Hawes Inc. last year and everybody loved it because they were just tired of looking at pearl buttons on their wrists. When you boil the business of changing style and fash- ion down to gloves, it becomes almost too clear. You see that there is a basic shape you have to cover and an anatomical way of doing it. You see that the public likes a little change 283 from time to time and that they can be satisfied quite simply. You see that the style of the glove remains fundamen- tally the same because it is functional. You perceive how slight is the demand for changing fashion in your glove, how it is mostly a matter of amusement. And you find Fashion kicking up a great fuss about try- ing to make everything different all the time. Through his advertising departments Fashion decrees that gloves must be all colors of the rainbow one year, that they will be all plain white the next, that this season they are to have cuffs and next season they will have six buttons. As soon as one gets into any field in wearing apparel where a fundamental functional form has been achieved, the fussing and fuming of Fashion become startlingly apparent. Oddly and satisfactorily enough, they also become of little account. Their great aim of constant change is stopped short. The public, in a dumb way, just insist on having what they want once they have been able to find it. They stick to it until something really better crosses their path. Fashion may flaunt a million fancy gloves in their faces, the majority of women just calmly buy the most satisfactory type however old it may be. Just as this is the case with gloves, so it has proven with sweaters. If a fundamentally satisfactory way had been de- veloped for making clothes in mass production, Fashion would be far less successful in changing women's clothing every six months. Fashion is not very successful in changing women's sport clothes, including sweaters. Sport clothes ap- proach complete comfort and satisfaction. They are sleeve- less, or short sleeved, loose and, may I say, "ill-fitted" ac- cording to the ideas of fit which other types of women's clothes try to reach. The nearer that women's sport clothes 284 get to being simple affairs of shirts and shorts, slacks, or flaring skirts, the less yearly change can be found in them. What is the fundamental weakness in other types of wom- en's clothing? Leave aside for the time being the ideas on changing fashion, together with questions of style, are most ready-made clothes actually comfortable? Do they fit? Can they be "sized" right? I say no, not as they are now conceived and designed. There are no size 14 women in the world, nor are there any size 16. There is no wholesale dress which fits any woman who buys it. No two women in the world have the same proportions, width of shoulder, length of arm, height of waist. The great majority of women in the United States, never having had their clothes made to fit them, have not the faint- est idea what it is to be really comfortable in clothes, with the exception of sweaters which stretch and fit automatically and some sport clothes. Any dress which is made to a size catches you somewhere, in the ribs because the waistline is too high, across the back because the back is too narrow, under the arm where the armhole is too small. Wholesale clothes are all designed to be made to order. It is during the fittings of the type of clothes still being worn by all women that the waist is put in the right place, so you can breathe, the shoulder is made the right width so the sleeve doesn't drag and pull, the sleeve is made long enough for you, the neckline cut out enough for your neck. Once a dress has been cut and entirely sewed up with no material left in any seam, it is absolutely impossible ever to take it to pieces and really make it fit any special woman. The vast majority of American women are uncomfort- able in their clothes whether they know it or not. A good 285 many of them know they can't get wholesale clothes to come anywhere near fitting. How can this be otherwise when the basis of all Amer- ican designing has for generations been the clothes of the French couturiers? Of their methods and reasons for design- ing, I have already said enough. The whole French couture, I repeat, is based on crafts, on making designs to order. The American couture, to which I inadvertently ap- pointed myself a pioneer, is based on the same methods. This kind of designing has no application of any kind to machine production. Even the spirit of a large majority of the actual designs has no application to machine production. Machine produc- tion is in masses and should be for masses. It must be con- ceived in relation to the actual lives of the people who are going to wear it and not in relation to a group of women who lead lives of leisure. How much advertising space is devoted to showing clothes designed especially for the working girl? A little, but a very little. And how satisfactory are the clothes which the working girl can buy for her price? The girl who wants to look neat in her office is faced, year in year out, with a little black or navy blue dress with the traditional white collar. Neat, to be sure — when she leaves home in the morning. Neat, that is, if she has time and energy to press it every night. The stuff of her dress is a mass of wrinkles over her fanny since she sits hour after hour before her typewriter. The back of the dress suffers likewise if she leans against her chair for any period. The dress will be neat if she can afford to have it cleaned often enough, for the dress seldom is wash- able. And with all of this, the typical office dress is a deadly 286 bore, an unglorified uniform which adds little to the spice of life. The clothes designers of the future, the American De- signers if you like, will find some way of solving these prob- lems of neatness and cleanliness and a fundamental human desire to look attractive. These designers will also find some way of designing clothes that must fit, so that they have no specific demarcation line to emphasize the varying widths of shoulders, so that they must, by virtue of the basic design, hug into any size waist. The basic design of something is what you have left after all the meringue has been scraped off. If it's a good basic design, it is functional. So, the design of an untrimmed, pull- on glove is the base for all glove design at the moment. It is a simple, functional covering for the hand. The Hoover apron, that simple tie-around affair, orig- inally blue cotton with a white collar, is a basic design. It is thoroughly functional when used as an apron. It is not func- tional as a dress because it only wraps across the front and so can fly open when you walk in it. The basic design of most wholesale dresses, the reason that manufacturers can do nearly a whole "line" on one pat- tern, is a simple affair. The whole garment is cut straight up and down the material. The skirt is two straight pieces with seams on either side. Pleats may be inserted at various spots, godets may be set in. The base of the skirt remains the same. The waist is attached to the skirt in the waistline (wherever that is) and has darts below the bust to give room above. There are two darts on the shoulder to give room below. There is an armhole into which is set a straight sleeve. Full- ness may be inserted into the sleeve, the neck may be left high or cut low in any one of many shapes. A collar may be 287 added, or a bow, or a clip, or a belt. The basic pattern re- mains the same. As I have said, it is in the fitting of even this simplest type of basic present-day dress pattern to the individual that all allowances are made for variations in physical structure. And if I have not made it plain that such a design cannot really fit without being made to order, then you will have to have one made for yourself to convince you! When I say that mass-produced clothes should be de- signed on basic patterns which can be made by machine, I mean that either we must not try to have them fit as custom- made clothes fit or we must have materials to make them of which do not now exist. We may perhaps have dresses which are quite full and blousy, gathered in at the waist, which must not be cut in the garment, by a belt or sash of some kind. The shoulder and sleeve must not try to fit tightly but must cover the shoulder and arm comfortably and loosely. The Japanese kimono is a basic design of this sort. It is not, however, a thoroughly functional design for our more active Western pursuits. The Hoover apron is made on the same wrap-around principle. I cannot say exactly how mass-produced clothes should be cut because I only know that they are wrong. I have full confidence that some designer or designers, working unham- pered by any fashionable legends, will develop something about which I have so far had only time to think. To make possible the designing of clothes which fit, the fabric manufacturers will have to become American fabric manufacturers, or machine manufacturers. They must cre- ate materials which stretch, perhaps only in certain places. There is already a tiny beginning of that in Lastex. Probably I am being far too unimaginative. Probably 288 the clothes designer of the future will design a mold into which will be poured some substance which will solidify into a finished garment. Undoubtedly even before that we will have delightful paper underclothes which can be worn and thrown out after being bought by the gross at Woolworth's. And paper other clothes for hot summer days. Insulated overcoats will be nice because they won't weigh anything. I would not be doing justice to the future of clothes if I did not point out that practically all psychologists who have bothered to consider the subject agree that eventually we will all become nudists. The time, money, and energy spent on dressing will be directed toward the desirable end of being actually, physi- cally beautiful, thereby making us, ourselves, so decorative that it will be quite unnecessary to cover our ugliness with garments of any kind. That basic reason for wearing clothes at all, sex appeal, will shine out all over our healthy skins. Modesty, another reason for wearing clothes, is already rapidly going by the boards. Most people believe that the final matter of wearing clothes for protection will be washed up by our securing complete control of our physical en- vironment in the matter of heating, cooling, and what-not. Thus, in the broadest sense of the word, nobody should consider the future of any clothing, for there will be no such animal. Every individual will go about, to quote I. C. Flugel, "distaining the sartorial crutches on which he perilously supported himself during the earlier tottering stages of his march towards a higher culture." Since I fear we shall all be dead before this highly desir- able end of all dress designers is accomplished, I throw the idea into the pot where I'm stewing up other legends. At any rate, I am away ahead of my story. It was the very 289 obvious beginning of a return to prosperity which gave me time to have a flight of fancy, in the spring of 1935. My customers began to order more clothes, the Smith Co., for whom all this time I'd been designing bags, had, to their great chagrin, paid me several thousand dollars in royalties on a much larger gross business than they'd antici- pated when we made the contract. This, I assume, must be ascribed to their ability to cut prices. If you recall, they were running an out-of-town non-union shop. Mr. Postman was beginning to shower me with Lucky Strike royalties. I had time to be theoretically bothered over mass production, since the crafts were beginning to support me to it. I had time to reflect on the instability of all legends, in- cluding the French. I decided to take a long trip. 290 en J&le DJCE many another questing soul, I wanted to go to the oviet Union. Just what anyone expects to discover about the progress of socialism by skidding over the outside edge of a foreign country for a few weeks, I don't know. Annually dozens of people seem to discover what they want to and to publish their findings. 291 Some of them find out it is heaven, others of them dis- cover joyfully that it is hell. Life seems to be a continual combination of the two, the U.S.S.R. being no exception. I was fortunate in meeting the Soviet Consul in New York before I left and he proposed that I take along some clothes to show in Moscow. I was delighted because I knew I would see more in the U.S.S.R. if I were not just a tourist. The whole story of my Russian expedition has little place here. Suffice it to say that I was fascinated with looking at a bit of the beginning of something and they were fasci- nated with looking at my most elaborate and capitalistic clothes. I found the Soviet clothing industry in a very embryonic stage, just having arrived at the point of covering one hun- dred and sixty million socialists once. There was little the Russians could teach me about clothes, but one hopeful bit of theory sticks in my mind. The head of the Dress Trust, a thoroughly intelligent and pleasant lady who in many ways, even physically, resembled Mary Lewis of Best and Co., made this one point quite clear to me. What she said was also backed up by what I saw. The Soviet Dress Trust was basing its efforts as far as possible on a simple fact of life: The public should have what it wants, not what the Dress Trust decides it should want or might want, but what that public declares itself as wanting. The machinery for discovering wants was still as em- bryonic as the clothing business. It consisted in public show- ings of newly designed models for one thing. The audience voted on which dresses pleased them and these models were put into mass production. Another method was filling in blanks in stores, criticizing what existed or asking for what did not exist. My life in American department stores, except as a cus- 292 tomer, which is bad enough, has been limited to my jobs in France. I therefore quote a very astute lady named Marion Taylor, then employed by Vogue as a merchandising coun- cil. Miss Taylor made a speech in Chicago in the spring of 1937 in which she especially stressed one point. Once, she said, there was a system of "want slips" in de- partment stores. These slips were to be filled out by the sales- people, notifying the buyers of things which the public wanted and which the store was not providing. I gathered that in the course of human events, the use of these slips had fallen into disrepute. Miss Taylor was telling the merchants present in no un- certain terms that they would do well to revive these slips. "You do not pay enough attention to the wants of your cus- tomers," she said. Her opinion is shared by the head of the personnel sec- tion of a large group of department stores. He told me one day that the average department store spent two-thirds of its energy competing with the offerings of other stores rather than simply trying to find out what the customers wanted. The opinion is likewise shared by a large section of the public. "And when I asked the salesgirl for a coat without fur," say one hundred thousand women, "she just looked at me. 'Madame,' she said with raised eyebrows, 'coats without fur are not being worn this season.' What could I do?" What could she do? The Duchess of Windsor was wearing a coat with fur that season and one hundred thousand women could do likewise or go without. The dictates of dear old Fashion come first. One thing which upset me a good deal in Russia was the dictates of dear old something-or-other were taking a num- ber of Russian gentlemen out of their beautiful and comfort- able Russian blouses into the masculine strait-jackets of 293 our Western civilization. Oh, I know that if you've been beaten down for centuries while wearing a blouse, the first thing you do upon freeing yourself is to cast off the outward signs of slavery. Nevertheless, I consider the rise of uncom- fortable men's clothes in the Soviet Union by all odds the most pernicious result of the revolution. I've always been preoccupied with men's clothes, first because they're comfortable and second because they're un- comfortable, third because they're ugly and fourth because they're handsome. It was men's clothes that paid my fare to Russia. In the spring of 1935 a young lady turned up in my office from the American Magazine. She told me that they had a new color process and that the editor thought it would be amusing to get some women's designer to do sketches of col- ored, and therefore, original clothes for men, which they could print. "Fine," I said, "how different can I make them?" "Well," she said, "the editor is quite broadminded." I thought she was just offering me what people have a way of thinking is "free publicity" but I am very weak about falling for what I want to do anyway. I wanted to do some- thing about men's clothes. I told her to go back and get it quite straight how many and what kind of things the maga- zine wanted as I was in a hurry, leaving town in three weeks. The next day my secretary came to me laughing. "The American Magazine just called up," she said. "The girl was quite embarrassed. She forgot to speak to you about 're- muneration.' All they will be able to pay you is $500. She wants to know whether that will be enough." It was just enough to make my trip to Russia easy instead of just a bit difficult. I felt as if I'd found the money under 294 a stone some place. So I set to work to whip up four sketches of men's clothes. I had already done some research into men's clothes for an article I wrote and threw in the waste basket afterward. I was moved to do a piece one night while hearing a lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York. Frank Lloyd Wright, "modern architect" and functional designer, was expounding on the new world. He was properly attired in a stiff shirt and a black Tuxedo. Every time he said "modern," his stiff shirt cracked. Every time he said "functional," the shirt rose a little more out of the vest. He'd unconsciously pat it into place again and continue. I thought of all the architects I'd once made a speech to at their League. Some of them were "old school," neo-Greek, neo-Gothic, nineteenth century in outlook. Some of them were younger in age and equally neo. A few of them were working on reinforced concrete buildings, radio-cities, mass produc- tion houses. All of them were properly attired in versions of the evening clothes their fathers and grandfathers had worn before them. "Fantastic," I murmured, as Frank Lloyd Wright de- livered another blast at the dead past. And I began to ask questions at dinner parties. "Are you comfortable?" I inquired solicitously of a gen- tleman who had just surreptitiously put his finger into the edge of his collar and wiggled it a bit. "What?" "Are you comfortable in those clothes?" "Of course!" "Really? I thought your collar was cutting into your neck," I said. "It's an old collar and it's rough on the edge," he ex- 295 plained. Then he added belligerently. "There is nothing wrong with these clothes." That's where I always had the men. They became furious the minute their clothes were questioned. Fury either took the form of a coldness and a quick get-away or a violent argument. This with the exception of a few men who agreed with me a hundred percent. The matter of men's evening clothes got me down so that I gave up having people dress when they came to my house for dinner. What parties I give are anything but formal. However, ladies quite rightly prefer to dress in the eve- ning. Ladies evening clothes are so supple, so comfortable, and can be so alluring. I found, that once my mind had gotten stiff-shirt con- scious, I spent hours after dinner waiting to see which gentle- man's shirt would crack first. I will grant them that if the stiff shirt is properly cut and fitted and tied down and the party is one at which one never relaxes but just sits in a straight chair and makes formal talk, the stiff — or stuffed — shirt is the perfect adjunct. When most of the furniture consists of couches and there aren't enough of those to go around finally, when there is plenty of Scotch and soda and everyone breaks down and be- gins to chatter, then I always fervently hope that some brave male will just rip off his stiff shirt and let his tummy sink comfortably, his back bend into the curve of his upholstered chair. When summer comes burning into New York and every- thing goes informal or out of town, then no man expects to dress for dinner. They come happily in their light wool suits and, as they drink their second cocktail, little drops of per- spiration begin to appear here and there. 296 This is how I developed my second big idea on male gar- ments. "Why don't you take off your coat?" The male would first look surprised and pleased, then sigh to himself as he said, "I have on suspenders." "Why don't you wear a belt?" "My trousers wouldn't hang right," he said first. Later, "Suspenders are more comfortable." Days of research assured me that suspenders are more comfortable. I wouldn't believe it at first. I felt sure it was just the tradition of the pleated trouser. Finally I became quite convinced that having your pants loose around the waist and hung from the shoulder is a lot better than binding yourself in the middle with a leather strap. That is how I first came to worry about suspenders. They are certainly, by and large, so ugly that I don't know as I would want to expose them in the presence of any lady whose aesthetic regard I valued. In connection with colors, the main demand of the Amer- ican Magazine, my tactics in questioning were as follows: "What do you like to buy most?" The inevitable response, after consideration, was "Neck- ties." Just to cut things short, I replied, "That's because it's the only thing you wear that has any color in it at all. It's perfect nonsense." "Color!" They snorted. "Only pansies wear colored clothes." God help the American male with his background of having to be Masculine. It's practically as all-pervading in his conscious and subconscious as the fashionable lady's desire to be fashionable. In 1935 it was not masculine to wear shirts open at the neck; it was not masculine to wear colors excepting navy, black, brown, gray, and tan; it was 297 not masculine to wear sandals. It was masculine to wear wool all the year round, stiff shirts in the evening, heavy shoes all summer long. Only a few years before that, it had not been right to wear soft collars at any time. I turned out my four sketches for the magazine just be- fore I sailed for Russia. My sport clothes were quite routine, sweaters and trousers arranged so they could be worn nor- mally or tucked into the tops of heavy socks if the golf course was wet. I can find nothing wrong with trousers. They're both comfortable and practical. I prefer to wear them myself when I'm working or otherwise active. I wouldn't recom- mend them for cases where feminine allure is the main ob- ject. At the same time I was doing the American Magazine things, it hadn't occurred to me that there were times when males might do well in skirts, too. I did a business suit for the American with a dentist's blouse shirt and a collarless coat cut in Tuxedo fashion, not to button. No necktie because the shirt was a color, and, any- way, there was no collar, just a straight band. It would be well to obliterate the collars on men's sack coats. They sel- dom if ever fit. They hunch up when a man sits even if they are cut to fit when he stands. In fact, the well cut coat of a business suit is an idiocy. In order to sit down in it, the man has to unbutton it! The evening clothes included kummerbunds, soft shirts with bands for collars, colors. Of the colors, in the American Magazine, we will not speak. I got samples of the fabrics I would have used for the clothes and gave the colors. The new color process was not very accurate. Also the artist who did the finished sketches for the magazine added bits like navy blue shoes which I had not indicated. The thing came out in the fall after I had returned. I was 298 quite shocked at the appearance of the sketches. Not so the entire public. Letters began to roll in from all over the coun- try. "Where can I get that shirt?" "Please, Miss Hawes, do some more clothes for men." I thought I'd better continue and spent a month trying to line up just five men who would buy themselves suits of my design. I got Tony Williams, the New York tailor, to say he'd make the things up, but my initial mistake was in not decid- ing then and there to present the men with the clothes. It gave me an inferiority complex in my negotiations. For instance, there was the Forum. Mr. Henry Goddard Leach sent me word, after he saw the American Magazine sketches, that he would like me to do an article on the sub- ject. Goody, I thought. I made an appointment to see him. "Mr. Leach," I said, to a tall gentleman of middle age who stands up very straight and is well built, "If you believe in having more comfortable clothes, will you buy yourself a suit of my design made by a good tailor?" Mr. Leach looked a little put out. "I will go farther," I added. "You want an article from me. I will do it for you for nothing if you will buy a suit." We discussed suits. Mr. Leach was very proud of his shirts which he had made specially of some to-him-wonder- ful material, a bit of pique which we girls have been using for shirts for years. Finally I brought him back to the point. Would he wear a Hawes suit? "Miss Hawes," he said, "I wear anything I please. I don't care what anyone says. But I shall have to see what my wife thinks about this." I guess his wife did not think well of it. I did him an article but it wasn't "controversial" enough for him. So I dropped that. Then I nabbed Stanton Griffis, a gentleman from Wall 299 Street. Since Mr. Griffis had shown so much imagination in his successful business career, which includes not just stocks and bonds but books and the theater, I thought he might humor me. Besides, he is a nice man. That was my trouble with him. I took pity on him. I got myself invited to the rodeo one night for the express purpose of selling Stanton Griffis a suit. I stuck through thick and thin and saw to it that I got taken home the last of three ladies by quietly forgetting to remind him when we went by 67th Street the first time. As soon as we had dropped Margaret Case of Vogue on upper Park Avenue and Stanton had said, "Twenty-one East Sixty-seventh Street," to the chauffeur, I set to. "Stanton," I inquired, "will you buy a suit from me?" "Of course, I will," he answered. (I might have known it was all going too easily.) "I didn't know you were going into the men's business." I settled back more comfortably in the corner of the car. "I'm not really. Tony Williams will make the clothes. I just want to design them. What color will you have?" A tension came over Mr. Griffis' body which I could per- ceive even in the dark and from the other side of the car. "These are not to be just ordinary suits," I remarked. Mr. Griffis cleared his throat. "I haven't gotten a suit in America in twenty years," he said weakly. I saw that the greatest innovation I could offer Stanton Griffis was to have an exact copy of his English evening clothes reproduced on Fifth Avenue. "Good night, Stanton," I jumped out of the car in front of my house. "I'll call you up about it." I checked him off and set to work on Paul Cooley, an at- tractive young man from Hartford. Paul was most enthusias- tic. He has no inhibitions of any kind. He even scared me. He 300 thought that he'd like a ruffled shirt and I found myself about to tell him that men didn't wear ruffles. We repaired to Tony Williams in the Squibb Building to talk it all over. Tony, I may add, was a little leery of my scheme. I spent a half hour there and during that time Paul ordered two suits, of Tony's more or less conventional cut. I looked at my watch. It was time to get back to Hawes Inc. Paul was beginning to buy a third suit. "I have to get along, Paul. I'll do you some sketches and see when you come down next time," I said as I left him to Tony's quiet solicitude. My tactics were wrong somewhere, I decided, and dropped the whole business of men's clothes for a year while Hawes Inc. began to really flourish in definitely returning prosperity. I did not forget, however, and in early February of 1937, I decided that life was more flourishing and more easy and I would start in again on my men's clothes. Now, in the meantime, big things had been happening in the field of men's clothes. Soft, colored, open shirts had be- come masculine. Dark colored evening clothes had been ac- cepted. The Merchants Tailor's Association had come to life. They invited me to make a speech to them in December, 1936. Unfortunately, I always retain a childish faith that all aeroplanes fly. I planned to come back from Palm Beach one day to make the speech that night. All aeroplanes do not fly in the winter. So I missed seeing the Association in the flesh. But I see their works in print. The gentlemen have an idea. It is very simple. It is that men should have more color in their clothes. Perhaps it is even that men should have comfortable clothes. It is certain that men should have more clothes. Is that the ugly little head of Fashion I see in the corner? 301 Did you happen to notice that the best dressed men of America were chosen in 1936? Did you know any of the men chosen? Did you hear them voice their dismay and ir- ritation? Well, relax. They were not so dismayed at heart. Men aren't any different from women after all. Several of the men went right off to their tailors and ordered whole batches of new suits, realizing that they must keep up their public acclaim. Don't misunderstand me, I see no reason why men should be any different from women about their clothes. There were many many years when men wore silks and satins and pinks and blues and loved it. It is a great puzzlement to me why, when in general the men earn the family budget, it can't be divided equally where the clothing section comes in. The men are just screaming for a chance to break down and have someone take an interest in their problems. They are so eager for it they mostly all pretend they wouldn't hear of such a thing. When you talk seriously and alone to a member of the male sex on the matter of his clothing, he becomes quite coherent and, at the same time, is apt to develop all the pho- bias that most women have about themselves. I had a serious talk with Tony Williams in February, 1937. 1 suggested that he and I give a party together to show my clothes and his clothes and that we add to the party some of my men's designs. I then pointed out that I could not go and ask men to buy my clothes for themselves when it was all experimental. I wanted very much to make them clothes that they would like to wear, but whether or not they actually wore them after they got them mustn't be the main concern. I couldn't ask the men to support me to my experiment- ing. It was enough to make them my victims. Tony agreed to 302 sacrifice his time and energy and money to the future and I proceeded to do likewise. My victims were wonderful. They were willing. In the beginning they were amused. In the end they were entirely cooperative. I selected a dramatic critic, a stage designer, a lawyer, an advertising salesman, a young man-about-town, and a dancer. The plan was to make them each a suit of my design, de- tails to be agreed upon. They would then appear at a private party where I would show ladies' clothes and Tony some of his men's clothes. On the basis of my past experience, I invited them all to come separately to talk things over with me, at my house where the conservative element wouldn't set them to buying ordinary suits at once in self-defense. The conversations were marvelous. One of the gentlemen said that he thought it was a great mistake to consider putting men into gay clothes. Men, he said, were a background for women and should remain in that position. Well — at least in the instance of our party, he had the chance to see what it feels like not to be a background. Another victim came in very diffidently. "I don't know why you want me to do this," he said. "I'm awfully messy in my clothes." My eyes fell out of my head. "Everyone says you're probably the neatest man in town," I answered. "No," he shook his head sadly, "I am not. I have my suits made to order. I go from tailor to tailor. I even have my shirts made to order. Nothing does any good. I am not neat." Just the old case of the lady who persisted in thinking she had a fanny. It didn't matter that she didn't have one. She felt as if she had. The dancer simply bellowed at me when I phoned him 303 the first time. He was in the habit of dancing in full evening dress. "There is nothing wrong with the clothes I dance in!" he shouted. "Why don't you come to lunch?" I asked. I then pre- pared myself to try and separate him just a tiny little way from black and white and tails. I suggested, tentatively, that he have a rust suit. This was during the first course. I was wearing a fuchsia sweater. He had red hair. Suddenly, over the dessert, he looked up with a bright eye, "Why couldn't my jacket be that color?" He pointed to my sweater. "Why, I didn't think ..." I began. Joy flooded my heart. Nothing could be nicer than red hair and fuchsia, they are so perfectly wonderfully awful together. "Yes, you could if you really want to wear it." "I'm a dancer," he said assertively. "I can wear any- thing." The lawyer was a man after my own heart, one of my old- est friends. He said, "Make me anything you like but don't give me a stiff shirt." I might add that the lawyer was paying off an election bet. He bet me anything I wanted that Roose- velt would not carry New York State in 1936. I had only a few things on my mind in doing the clothes. I wanted them to be comfortable. I wanted them to be attrac- tive. I wanted to bring suspenders out into the open. Con- stance Loudon, my assistant, without whom there would not have been any men's clothes because I got the flu in the mid- dle of it all, decided that she wanted to see men in skirts. "What do you mean, Connie?" I asked, rising feebly from my pillows. "It seems to me trousers are quite satisfac- tory." Connie held up a little rough sketch. There was a big strong man in a fine flowing Arabian Nights robe. It was 304 wonderful. It was made for Tony Williams and was, I think, by all odds the most handsome thing in the show. It made me quite certain, once and for all, that for being alluring, the skirt is the thing and there is no difference between the sexes. It was the kind of a robe Othello probably wore when he was busy killing Desdemona. Nobody has ever thought of Shake- speare's Moor as anything but a full-blooded male. Men and women are quite different in one thing. That's the way they behave while fitting their clothes. The men are wrong. A few couturiers to relax them, and they would real- ize their mistake. Women when they fit, never stand still. They raise their arms and fix their hair when you're trying to get the length of the dress. They reach for a cigarette as you pin in a sleeve. They turn and crane their necks to see who's going by the door while you are arranging the neck line. It makes fitting very difficult but it has its good point. By the time you've fitted a dress on a woman, you know how she stands, walks, moves and what's going to happen to your dress after it leaves the fitting room for public life. The men simply amazed me at their fittings. The instant they entered the room, they assumed a positively military carriage. In went their chins, back went their shoulders, in went their tummies. And they proceeded to hold it without a breath, without a movement, until the fitting was finished. The result is, obviously, that the minute they get wear- ing the clothes in ordinary life, they stand entirely differ- ently and everything falls out of place. The matter of a fitting isn't just the ordinary course of human events to a man. It's a ceremonial occasion. When the last man had been gotten to his last fitting, which was quite a job because men don't make fitting ap- pointments like women, they just turn up — after they had 305 finally turned up, for the last times, it was the night of the party. I may say, I was in a nervous jitter. Showing clothes in Paris and Russia was nothing to what I went through wonder- ing whether the men would finish with this affair we had all started. I did not have them to rehearse or even tell them in advance what I hoped they would do. I just got a lady for each man and told her she was to get her man around the rooms, up and over the platforms. She was not to let him escape except over her dead body. Then I sent every man a bottle of champagne at six o'clock, and got dressed to receive the guests at ten. Al- though I did my best to keep the party to the invited num- ber, everyone brought a friend in the inimitable New York fashion. It was quite a jam, but most people prefer a jam in New York. I didn't see much of the beginning of the show. Six gentlemen appeared, each with a professional model, one pair following the next. The gentlemen wore very elegant and more or less conventional clothes, day and evening, made for them by Tony Williams. The professional models, like my lady guest stars who were later to get my men's designs over the bumps, had been told not to let any man escape. The only gentleman who decided to escape was Lucius Beebe. He was to ap- pear in a simple burgundy tux of Tony Williams' design, accompanied by a tall and very lovely blonde model who had been faithfully working for me for a couple of years. When Mr. Beebe arrived at the party, he decided he wouldn't show after all. It seemed to me like one thing too many at the time, but also nothing to get into an argu- ment about. I instructed the model to go out alone when the time came. I then instructed Harry Bull and Gilbert 306 Seldes, the announcers, to make the proper introduction. When the blonde model floated out onto the first platform from between the blue satin curtains, Mr. Bull said in a loud clear voice, "This is 'Act of God' without Lucius Beebe." ("Act of God" was the name of the dress.) Mr. Beebe rose to his feet and joined the act. He then decided that showing in one room was enough and sat down again. The model, preceding him, suddenly became aware of his disappearance, turned around, went back to his chair, took a firm grip on his arm and gracefully dragged him into the front room. That finished the first act of the show, which was fol- lowed by twenty or thirty beautiful girls in beautiful Hawes dresses in the customary fashion show routine. The only dire result of that first act was that an English gentle- man who'd been modeling a tasty plaid town suit got into the models' room and insisted on helping the girls. I finally dislodged him by much the same means the model used to get Mr. Beebe to his feet. It was a very mixed-up evening for me. Little things happened constantly like the English gentleman — and the fact that there kept being no drinks in the gentlemen's dress- ing room. That "dressing room" consisted of a screen in the basement which was quite inadequate and added noth- ing to the good nature of my guest stars. The final formal act of the evening was my lady guest stars and gentlemen guest stars, paired off together, each in an elegant Hawes design. After casting a final look over them in the dressing room, I made a dash up to the top of the stairs and got onto a chair to see how it had all turned out. Just at that moment there was a terrific crash. "The bar tipped over," I remember remarking to my- self. Then a great blast of cold air came up my bare back. 307 It was a welcome feeling. Something to breathe besides cig- arette smoke. But what — ? I learned hopefully toward the first platform, deciding the solution of the crash would have to wait until I'd seen the gentlemen do their stuff . Came the stage designer . . . blue linen, non-crushable linen, trousers, attached with brass rings to the striped sus- penders which went over a natural-colored and also non- crushable linen blouse, the blouse zipped up the front with a straight attached collar which could be zipped shut or left open as low as the heat demanded. "Something to work in in town when it's hot that is neat enough to wear for receiving clients. I don't want to have to put on my coat," that's what he wanted — and wanted me to make a coat he could wear with it! I refused to make the coat. The dramatic critic, a gentleman who thought he wasn't by nature neat, came through the curtains looking very neat and not a little embarrassed, carefully letting his lady have the center of the stage. He wore a green linen tunic, belted and with a zipper up the front, a band around the neck, which could be zipped up or left open. The tunic went with some heavy gray Chinese silk pants which had a Lastex band to hold them on, thus avoiding both the tight belt and the suspender. The whole outfit was planned for wearing in the hot summer. It was just about as light as pajamas. The advertising salesman was simply clad for dinner at home. He had sailor pants, laced in back, made of light weight, fine wale corduroy, and a sweat shirt of striped up- holstery linen. My lawyer's Hawes dinner clothes were of bright dark blue wool. They were conventional as to trouser. The shirt was soft white silk, made like a dentist blouse with a straight band at the neck, buttoned in back, no tie. The vest was diagonal stripes, and the coat collarless and 308 cut to hang open in front. The lawyer is amply built. He got a terrific amount of applause which he explained to me afterward was just because he knew so many people in the audience but I think it was really because he appeared to be having a perfectly wonderful time. The young-man-about-town wore black faille trousers which were strapped under his pumps, a salmon-pink faille, double-breasted, waist-length jacket, and a white silk shirt and stock, formal evening clothes and they looked per- fectly swell. Tony Williams appeared in person next, accompan- ied by his wife in a gray-blue monk's robe, a background for the Arabian Nights house coat. For a brief moment I wondered whether men shouldn't wear skirts all the time. I find they have a great desire to wear togas, incidentally. The dancer became so vague and artistic during the making of the clothes that I sent a special gentleman to see that he ever came to the party. He kept forgetting his fittings because he was composing a new dance to do at the Plaza (yes, it was Paul Draper). He had tight plum trousers, strapped under his shoe, a short gray-green jacket zipped up the front, a bright pink satin neckerchief which I thought looked lovely with his red hair. (He didn't, I believe, share my passion.) Underneath the jacket was supposed to be a most im- portant part of Mr. Draper's costume . . . suspenders of rust and fuchsia felt, wide on the shoulder and coming to a point where they joined the trouser . . . and there should have been a blue knitted shirt. However, it all got so rushed that at the last fitting, the blue shirt was a mess and I just gave him my own fuchsia sweater to wear. It fitted — quite tight . . . and was a great deal too short. The general ef- fect was fine to me because I knew what it was supposed to 309 look like. It must have seemed a touch odd to the audience. In fact, I often wonder what the whole thing looked like to the audience. I was little tired, but quite pleased, as I saw Mr. Draper abandon his lady and execute a few steps without benefit of tails on his coat. His costume was just a sketch which might or might not ultimately be real- ized, perfected, by me or someone else. So with all those men's designs: shots in the dark, em- bryonic ideas, the suspender exposed and handsome, the extraneous necktie relegated to limbo, the stiff collar non- existent, the vest used to give a spot of color and some line, thrown out as just an extra article of clothing, silk and cotton and linen for summer, sweat shirts and comfort for dinner. I don't really know whether any of those cooperative angels who sacrificed themselves to my whims ever wear their clothes. Somehow, it isn't terribly important. The vital thing to me was that I just had a chance to imagine for a few minutes that men's clothes might be comfortable — that maybe I wouldn't always have to suffer while men turned their soft necks about in starched, scratchy linen; that some day I'd actually see hundreds and hundreds of men going about the July hot streets of New York in cool linen tunics and silk trousers; that maybe one day the women would relax and enjoy being a background now and then for the gay male birds; that possibly when some masculine creature took it upon himself to throttle me for some real or imag- inary sin, instead of looking up and having my last living impression a dull mud-like uniformed being, I'd see won- derful rich colors and hear the heavy swish of rich damask. My visions as exemplified at the party lasted a short ten minutes. The cold air poured up my back constantly and 310 the crash rang in my head. I stepped off the chair and de- scended the stairs. In the entrance hall I saw a flock of policemen and the Holmes detective, my secretary, who had been checking people in, a couple of surprised looking guests. There I saw my large plate-glass window lying in little pieces on the floor. There was no blood. I waved my hands and smiled a little and everyone slowly melted away into the street. I told the secretary to find the houseman and block up the window. I forgot to ask what had happened. When I got back upstairs, the guests were rising. Talk, talk, talk. Smoke, Scotch and soda, food, photographers. . . About an hour later a strange man came up to me, say- ing, "I'm so sorry. Really, I'm terribly embarrassed. I hope it was insured." Something I missed happened, I thought. "Oh, yes, I'm sure it was," I answered. He held up two bandaged fingers. Light dawned. Once I had a new Afghan hound, unused to houses. He sprang full force at the plate-glass window while I held my breath and waited for the crash. The window held. The gentleman with the two bandaged fingers had been in a hurry to get to the party. He got in through the window. Parties are like that. Experimenting is like that. You never know until a long time after just what happened. Just what happened ... to the men's clothes? Just what had happened to my designing bags for the Smith Co.? What was happening to Mr. Postman's gloves? What, now in the spring of 1937, was happening to Hawes Inc.? 311 23 ' Lsar (Competitive QJvdtem WHAT had happened to Elizabeth Hawes, by the spring of 1937, was that she didn't have one wholesale job left and was thanking God for it. Hawes Inc., because of a reluctantly returning prosperity, had paid back all past debts. 313 Miss Hawes had her third and apparently thoroughly efficient manager. She was able to raise her salary to nearly half what most people thought she earned. The twenty-five percent yearly increase in sales had continued unabated for three years. Hawes Inc. was paying its way and the manager in question was trying hard to begin laying by enough cash to see it through the next depression! I was not only an Amer- ican eouturiere. I was for the moment a solvent one. And so, in the order in which it occurred, let me check off those wholesale jobs which haven't checked me off in past chapters. In the summer of 1935, 1 either dropped or was dropped by the Smith Co. Do you remember that once, long ago in 1932, 1 had begun to tell the Smith Co., "Not stiff, like card- board, see? Soft— Soft— SOFT." When I finally parted with them, three years later, they were beginning to make a few soft bags. I guess they found out it was cheaper. The story of the Smith Co. is just the old fable of Box, Cox, and Nox. There were once three bag firms, Smith Co., Jones & Co. and Willy's. The backgrounds of the three firms were identical. They all made expensive copies of the same French bags. They all made a living at it. Smith sold his bags to Altman. Jones sold his bags to Best. Willy sold his bags to Lord and Taylor. Somebody undid a screw in the stock market in 1929 and it all fell down. Smith and Jones and Willy all found they weren't doing enough business to keep alive. Smith, as we have seen, decided to get an American Designer. Jones decided to go to Connecticut where he could run a non-union shop, wages could be lower, and he could keep on copying French bags but at a cheaper rate. Willy decided 314 he'd stop buying French models. Going to Paris was expen- sive and he could steal all the designs he needed. Smith promoted Elizabeth Hawes bags all over the United States and it looked cheery at first. In 1933 he found, however, that no store wanted to pay him more than $4.50 wholesale for a bag and his bags were still well made and sold for $7.50. Jones found that, although his Connecticut shop was non- union, several other people were making French bags in Connecticut and doing it cheaper. Willy found that he couldn't run a shop in New York profitably even by stealing designs. All three of them saw that they must now manufacture bags to sell at $4.50. Smith cheapened down all the Hawes designs until they were merely envelopes. Still he couldn't make any money. Jones cheapened all his bags in Connecticut, but the union found him there and he had to move to Pennsylvania. So he didn't make any money in 1933. Willy made a little money in 1933. He moved to Con- necticut, became non-union, and continued to steal his de- signs. In 1934, Smith Co. decided to move to Connecticut to avoid paying union wages. Jones was safely settled in Penn- sylvania. He made a little money. Willy got caught by the union in Connecticut and moved to Pennsylvania, so he lost a little money that year. When 1935 hove upon the horizon, they all said to them- selves, "This year business will be good." So they took a deep breath and made a lot of bags in anticipation of big orders. Anyway, it is cheaper to make a lot of bags at once instead of filling small orders as they come in. The orders didn't come on the stock they'd made up. 315 Everyone liked the second lines of bags they showed later in the season. They all closed out their early stock at a loss. They grimly looked out the window. They saw the union coming over the horizon. "Damn it," they said. "How is a man to keep going? Here I am losing money and the union is coming in here to try and make me pay more than $12 a week! What is more, my employes work 48 weeks in the year." "But Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, Willy. That only makes $576 a year. How would you like to bring up a family on that?" ' "Yes, yes, yes. It is a terrible thing. Outrageous of course. I feel terribly sorry for my employes, but what can a man do?" So Mr. Smith finally became divested of Miss Hawes and took up French designs again. Mr. Jones decided to have a union shop, make expensive bags, and hire Muriel King to design for him. Willy suddenly remembered that he had been an expert bagmaker once and he found that the union wages were $75 a week. He returned to the bench. There was a scarcity of expert men to make sample bags. He worked 52 weeks and made $3,900 in 1935. Of course, he wasn't his own boss. He only had to work a 35-hour week. Unfortunately, not only these three gentlemen were en- gaged in the bag business, but hundreds of others. All of them went through the same thing. All of them are still go- ing through it. Apparently they will always go through it. Every time a Willy saves up a thousand dollars as an expert sample maker, he sets up for himself. It doesn't take much machinery or overhead to run a bag business. So sadly enough, after five years of it all, I decided only a miracle resulting in the death of seventy-five per cent of all 316 American bag businesses would put the Smith Co. in a posi- tion to settle on a definite policy and go ahead with it. One year our conferences would all consist in their ex- planations of why they must make cheaper bags. The next year we would spend three months wondering whether they had been right. The year after, we decided to have ten ex- pensive bag designs and ten cheap ones. The next day, they thought five expensive ones and fifteen cheap ones would be better. The next day, it was fifteen expensive bags and five cheap ones. I almost lost my mind. So did my first assistant designer, Dorothy Zabriskie. So did Connie Loudon, my next assist- ant designer. I felt we should plan the designs for the cheap bags so they would come out cheap to begin with. Otherwise, the Plain Smith just did something to the first bag which cut the cost in half and turned it into a pouch with three pin tucks. It would be unfair to say the Smith Co. did not care about what the public wanted. They hired me to tell them. Whatever I told them, they suspected of being untrue. I could never prove it because if the idea already existed, there was no use of their making it. We went to the mat on the matter of boxes one spring. They said no. We said yes. After three years, I gave in to them quite easily. I liked them but I got tired of listening to them straighten out their affairs and then unstraighten them. Repeatedly we urged them to do things, like the boxes, which, sure enough, came out of Paris a few months later. The bag business has its own little Zeitgeist. If you are deal- ing directly with women, you find yourself having that funny feeling that if you only had boxes this spring instead of bags, they'd all be delighted. I wanted the Smith Co. to make expensive bags for me to 317 sell at Hawes Inc., to let me test out my odd notions on my clients at those top prices which special orders cost and which Hawes customers can pay. They said yes, year after year. Then their sample maker never had time to make the special things and as their bags got cheaper they lost interest in mak- ing expensive ones. My arrangement was that any bag design I sold at Hawes Inc. belonged to me for a season. Once or twice when we did get a good bag from them, and began to order, order, order on it, they suddenly lost their self-restraint and made a cheap copy. Then they would call me down and say, "Look, Miss Hawes. We can make this bag for $5.50. Yours costs $12.50. We have just changed the leather and the lining and left out one pleat. It looks about the same." It would look just enough the same to make you sick. "Now, Miss Hawes," they would continue, "we could get an order tomorrow for four dozen of these bags from Best's. You'd make your commission." I worked on a retaining fee and a commission. "You wouldn't stop us from selling it? We haven't made a cent here since 1929." I always weakened. I don't know to this day whether they made any money or not. After they took the factory out of town to avoid the union, Plain Smith dropped a remark one day which sort of set me thinking. He said, "Of course, we didn't show any profit this season." Then he brightened up, after I had agreed to work a little less for much less money. "I did show a profit on the out-of-town factory, though," he said, as he took up his hat to leave. Oh, well. I was fond of the Smith brothers. They were like little fish caught in a net, partly of their own weaving mostly just the inevitable result of our great competitive sys- 318 tern. It had not made very rugged individualists out of the Smiths. Naturally enough, the most flourishing bag business in New York is Koret. Only a few months ago Mr. Delman of the shoes was showing me around his factory. "Couldn't you make bags?" I asked. "Golly," he said, "Mr. Goodman (of Bergdorf Good- man) asks me that every day. He says Koret is the only bag man who makes good soft bags. He's becoming so independ- ent nobody can do anything with him." "And why shouldn't Mr. Koret be independent?" I said to myself. He is a gentleman whom I have never met, but I feel sure he has guts. He built up his business through the de- pression. He advertised himself, yes. His ads don't lie. He makes as good a bag as you can buy wholesale, I think. The leather is good. The linings are good. The style is generally good. I am not sure whether he copies French bags. If he does, he changes them enough to cut out the competition. He does make bags of his own design. Probably he was lucky in being able to build from the bottom when times were bad, just as I was. Undoubtedly he is, or he hires, an excellent manager and actually knows ahead of time what bags are going to cost him. Almost no wholesaler knows what it really costs to make anything. At any rate, Koret started making and kept on making bags of good quality. He didn't dither around much. He wasn't frightened about what he was to design. He must run a union shop and pay a decent wage because he is too well known to escape being caught if he didn't. Probably he'll go under in the next depression because his overhead will be too big, the depression will be worse, he'll cut his price and his quality. However, I must say, in this day and age, among all the businesses I have touched, of 319 which bags is only one, it is only the rugged individualist who wins at all. He manages to place himself outside the competitive field in some way, never by price, usually by quality and style. He does not just whirl endlessly on the merry-go-round of wholesale competition. After Plain Smith made the remark to me about making money on his out-of-town factory, I never had quite my old feeling about the Smith Co. They were caught in a net, yes. They were being successful in escaping the union that year. But I saw that forever and ever they, as indecisive in- dividuals, would be going around and around on the com- petitive merry-go-round. The results of our bag designing for the Smiths were far more unsatisfactory to me than to them. I can't — I can't — bear badly made things of poor quality. I can't hire assist- ant designers and send them out month after month to try and deal with manufacturers who are going to break their hearts by leaving all the lines out of the design and making it in another leather. The Smith Co. contract was just quietly not renewed in July, 1936. By this time they have probably been forced to move from Connecticut to Pennsylvania. They have prob- ably bought French bags and stopped buying them. They may have another American Designer working for them. I wish her joy of it. I withdrew from my Postman glove job with far greater regret. Mr. Postman's partner didn't believe in promotion of any kind. Mr. P. had been overpaying me in any case. At first I thought I would try to design and promote for him. I thought that in some way I could arrange to promote nice simple designs and made a contract to do just ten gloves for them and to see that they were promoted. One day when I was talking to a girl about doing the ac- 320 tual work on the promotion under my aegis, I suddenly got sick of the whole idea. The same old Hoop-la to be gone through once more. Would they advertise, how much would they advertise? What was she going to be able to get into the papers? Would it all have to be about me and not about the gloves at all? What would the fashion magazines do? If I want to help Postman promote his gloves, I am faced with two equally inevitable duties. I must make him adver- tise somewhat in the better fashion magazines or, no matter how good the gloves are, no matter how bright my idea, we will get into the editorial pages not more than once a year, maybe twice, very small. Second, I must think up some bright news stories about gloves so they will be news and that either means some silly idea or that I, Hawes, actually take the publicity on my own head and electrify the world with my thoughts on the glove business. The only electrifying thing I can say about the glove de- signing is that ninety percent of it is awful! I bet Mr. Post- man's partner wouldn't appreciate that. So, in the fall of 1936, I took a leave of absence from Mr. Postman and gloves. I may go back to it because he re- mains for me the most honest and upstanding individual I have so far met in the wholesale field. I would rather like to make the world know that Mr. Postman makes the best gloves they can buy, because I know that he doesn't lie or cheat on his leather and workmanship. He is up against that same old devil of competition and more or less forced to be a "fence" for that foul thief Fash- ion. There is one and only one way of beating those two : turn out a good and individual product and tell the world. Telling the world can be so expensive, one wonders whether it is worth while. Great numbers of one's competitors are busy 321 cutting things with no seams and using fake leather, saving enough to be able to tell the world anything and having some left over for profit. Slowly, slowly, the individual manufac- turer is caught in the net. Almost inevitably he begins to chisel on quality for the purpose of competing on price. When I ran into the men's field, I thought to myself, here, at least, Fashion is not involved. Here one should be able to turn out a good product at a fair price. Here is not instability and constant change. The first result of the men's clothing jamboree was a slight pin prick of irritation. A month after the party, about which there wasn't much press in New York because I did my best to keep my promise and make it private, but about which there was a spread of national press because the A.P. was present, Hart Schaffner and Marx had five people call me and ask me to see them. I reflected on all the letters I'd gotten after the American Magazine sketches. I thought of all the boys pining for Hawes shirts. I was delighted to see Hart S. and M. A very high-powered gentleman turned up in my office. "We are going to have a Fiftieth Anniversary," he told me. "Yes?" "We want to show clothes from fifty years ago, clothes of today, and clothes for fifty years from now." I began to get a gleam. I set my jaw slightly. "We would like to use your clothes for the latter part," he told me. "The clothes belong to the gentlemen for whom they were made," I answered, stalling. "Couldn't you borrow them back?" "Do you think they're for fifty years from now?" "Well, we realize that they are very unusual. . . ." 322 "What are you going to pay me?" I got to that point quickly. "Oh, we thought it would be good press for you. We can get them into the movies." "I can get press for myself. Why do you want to get press on things if you think nobody wants them and you can't sell 'em?" I was furious. "Well, we thought you might like to have them in the movies," he was getting quite austere himself. "I'm not interested in doing anything merely for the sake of the press and you shouldn't be either. Some of the things could sell, others not. I am not interested in talking about them on any other basis." "Of course, if that's the way you feel . . . ," he rose. "That is the way I feel. Goodbye." I felt sick really. I felt better almost right away because one of my pet things was the tunic I made for the dramatic critic. My finished version was not perfect by any means, but the idea was there, the idea that men could be just as cool and undressed on the summer streets of New York as their wives. The very next summer, the male tunic began to appear. Not my tunic and none of my doing. But soft knitted shirts shown to be worn outside the trousers. Of course, they could be worn inside. Of course there was no way to hold up the trouser except a belt or any ugly suspender. Still, I felt vin- dicated. The little germ of tunics was planted. If Hart S. and M. had felt like investing a few pennies, a few hundred men would have bought tunics in 1936. The next year, a few more men would buy them. Presently many many men would be comfortably clad in the heat. And out of the men's clothes show came another small experience. Just another ray of light on the clothing business. 323 First I was having fun with my men's clothes. Then Hart Schaffner and Marx dragged in their promotion idea. Also, the Merchant Tailors, I admit, gave me some pause. But, by and large, I am somehow relying on chance to thwart Fashion in the men's field. Chance in the guise of the spoiled Ameri- can woman and her over-balanced clothing budget, chance in the shape of the masculine tradition, refusing change stol- idly, stupidly. It is interesting to note that changes in men's style come from the lower classes. I was interested in Hart Schaffner and Marx and the readers of the American Magazine because I felt they appealed to a quantity market. Perhaps Sears, Roebuck would be the best bet of all for introducing some- thing new to American men. In the field of male attire, one realizes very sharply the class distinctions in American life. The women, a majority dressed in mass-produced French interpretations, slide rather easily from top to bottom of the social scale, all dressed more or less alike, mostly all looking for some good man to support them. The economic foundations of our society are upheld by men. One of the emblems of the upper class male is his "cor- rect" clothing. When a young man achieves a dress suit, then he has reached the top. He can go about without being spotted for an underling. He can, in his opinion, consort with bankers on their own level. The well-cut sack suit, the neatly buttoned vest, the som- ber tie, are emblems of success and responsibility in the business world. It will never be, it is not, easy to get upper- class men to shed their birthright in clothes. It is the prerogative of the working man, the lower class guy, to wear no collar and no tie. He may go without a hat if he likes. He can wear loose, unpleated blue jeans. He can 324 show his suspenders if he wants. He can go shirtless in the hot summer, the straps of his overalls barely covering his hairy chest. He is thereby marked "unsuccessful." He is not admitted to the best clubs, nor even allowed to ride up in the elevator of the Squibb Building without a coat. He is hired for what- ever wage is necessary in a competitive labor market. Competing in that labor market, he may, as the saying goes, "have nothing to lose but his chains." By virtue of that fact, in the field of clothing, he has nothing to risk by being comfortable. His boss will not look askance if he turns up in sandals in the summer. He will not be fired for choosing to wear no collar to work. Through him have come the changes of style of the last few years in men's clothes. He, the worker, was the first to wear soft, knitted shirts, open at the neck. He has for years worn bright striped sweat- ers and loud checked suits if he felt like it. The Negroes in Harlem have been wearing wonderful colored suits for years, light blues, bright greens, stripes of orange and rust. Now the graduates of Yale and Harvard and Oxford are discovering that they, too, can be comfortable in soft shirts, gay in loud plaids and stripes. They are discovering it slowly, gingerly. Their fathers are not interested. Their fathers are interested in maintaining the status quo, cor- rectly clothed for that task. Anatole France said that if he could have any one book one hundred years after he was dead which would tell him the most about what was going on in the world, he would take a book of fashion. If he were, right now, to examine the clothing of gentlemen and ladies in America, he would find a certain leveling process going on, a drawing together of the upper and lower strata. 325 This, gentlemen, should give you something to consider before you throw your hats over the posts forever. Presently, if you are not careful, one will not be able to distinguish the boss from the worker. You may now, Mr. Anatole France, distinguish them by their suspenders. With all the enthusiasm of a child, I de- cided that suspenders should be brought out into the open. With all the stubbornness of the artist, I said that suspen- ders should be an aesthetic delight. With my humanitarian spirit raring to go, I became convinced that suspenders were hygienic and that all men should wear them. I therefore acquired a job to design suspenders, just after the men's fashion show, in the spring of 1937. 1 made my contact through a friend. I made a very bad money ar- rangement because I wanted to do the suspenders. I signed, sealed and delivered myself, my name, and all my promo- tional possibilities to the Park Suspender Co. for $500 cash and a small royalty. One thousand dollars in cash is supposed to be the least that can be involved where the Hawes name is seen in the ad- vertising of any other firm. I bowed my head before this enormous necessity I felt to make the suspender an outdoor and beautiful object. Before any money changed hands, I went to look over the Park "line." Previous to designing my men's clothes I did a great deal of research in the matter of suspenders. I be- came firmly convinced that wide suspenders were more com- fortable than narrow ones. The narrow suspender cuts the shoulder. None of the gentlemen to whom I talked had ever worn anything but wide, woven suspenders. They complained that it was very difficult to get nice ones. A number of them got their suspenders by the dozen at 20 cents a pair since these 326 were no more ugly than the $2.50 variety and $5 is a lot for a suspender. If you're particular, of course you have a pair of suspenders for every pair of trousers. The Park Suspender Co. said that almost all their "braces" sold for $1.50 but that, as times were getting bet- ter, I could make them for $2.50 if necessary. They could cheapen them later. I agreed to all this. I have no objection to anything being cheap if it's right. When I looked at the line, they kept showing me elastic suspenders about a half inch wide with clips on the bottom to clip onto the trousers. "What are these?" I asked. "These are $1.50," they said. "I mean, why are they so narrow?" "That is the width that all men now prefer," they assured me. "This is contrary to all my research," I answered. "You have been talking to the wrong people," they told me very firmly. "Don't these clips tear the trouser?" I asked. "Never," they answered. "Is it absolutely necessary to make them all in such ugly colors?" "Oh, no, we expect you to fix that." I picked up a pair of the elastic horrors and examined the clip. It was just wide enough to hold the half inch elastic. "Could you make these clips wider?" "But of course. Those are narrow because, naturally, it is cheaper to make narrow suspenders." "Oh, it's cheaper to make narrow suspenders?" "Naturally." "Then it isn't that all men want them?" "All men want narrow suspenders, Miss Hawes." I decided I'd better do a little more research. Maybe I 327 had been talking to the wrong men. I searched about until I found some men with narrow suspenders. "Why have you got on narrow suspenders?" I asked. "Because that's all we can buy for $1.50." They said. (They didn't know about the 5 & 10! ) "Do you like elastic suspenders?" I continued. "Certainly not," they answered. "They catch in our shirts and wrinkle them up. They are an invention of the devil. But if you have to wear narrow suspenders, elastic is the only kind that doesn't cut you to pieces." "How do you like clips on the ends of your braces?" "They tear our pants," they responded, "but an awful lot of suspenders are made that way now." "What kind of suspenders would you really like to wear?" I inquired. "Wide woven suspenders," came back the inevitable an- swer. Now, perhaps $2.50 is the least money for which a wide woven suspender can be made. I doubt it, because there is the 5 & 10, but the Park Co. more or less assured me of it. I had visualized a promotion campaign of Hawes suspenders which would first give the world handsome designs, such that gentlemen would go about tearing off their coats to show off their suspenders. Next, if such suspenders really had to cost $2.50, I had an idea that a little straight talking would convince a good many men to spend that vast sum for an article of clothing which they wear every day of their lives, on which a great deal of their comfort is dependent, and which should be ex- tremely durable. Lovely as it may be to have a pair of suspenders for every suit, it is not a vital necessity. The enormous expendi- ture of $5 a year for comfort and beauty in two pairs of 328 braces ought not to be too much for the great middle class customer. But, before I ever began my job for Park, I saw that I was undoubtedly beaten, not by Fashion, as in the women's field, but by simple economics. The Park Co. would never let me, even in my best New Yorker style, tell the world that narrow suspenders were not what all men wanted and that I knew it and so here were some wide ones. The Park Co. would insist on quibbling because they wouldn't want to spoil the sale of their narrow elastic sus- penders with clips. And what made matters worse, the Park Suspender Co. also manufactured belts. Therefore, it could not be said aloud that suspenders were more comfortable and hygienic than belts, because it might make the belt sales go off. Therefore the Park Suspender Co., having hired me for however little, to make a big noise about beautiful com- fortable suspenders, would simply end by saying in a small voice, "Here are some wide and beautiful and comfortable suspenders which Elizabeth Hawes, that smart young girl, has gotten up to replace all belts. You can buy them if you like them. Of course, we highly recommend to you our nar- row elastic suspenders which are cheaper. We don't really believe suspenders have to be wide at all, and God knows, we don't care what they look like. What is more, we think belts are wonderful and here are some of the most wonderful ones we ever saw." I shut my eyes and visualized the Park Suspender Co. trying very hard to make the public swallow all my wide beautiful woven suspenders and all their narrow elastic ones, together with thousands of belts. I saw the Smith Co. gorging up cheap bags and French bags and American bags and expensive bags. There was Mr. Nibs, waving Notatal 329 silk in my face, and the knitter, hiding his eyes from Brooks sweaters. The Marshall Field Co. was making little piles of old samples to copy. Mr. Postman was trying to escape from an avalanche of back-buttoned gloves. They were all screaming something at me. Slowly words disentangled themselves: "WE ARE NOT IN BUSINESS FOR OUR HEALTH." Then Mary Lewis looked up at me from behind her desk, "Ford makes all his money on Fords, not Lincolns," said Mary Lewis, quietly. Ray Kraemer bounded up beside her, with a little printed placard which read, "I would not take Bergdorf Goodman for a gift. The way to make money in this town is to manufacture $3.75s." 330 Qst's Q)pinac& A LARGE part of the laughing one did at the old Charlie Chaplin with the funny shoes was to avoid crying over his too human predicaments. Perhaps it is the same instinct which makes me suggest that the easiest way to get out from under Fashion is to laugh him off. 331 He is only a little man with green gloves who does things up in cellophane wrappers. The mere idea that he had the nerve to suggest "all beautiful clothes change regularly every six months" is enough to put him in his place. He's had his day and practiced his little jokes long enough. I could cry over the plight of the American manufac- turer of women's clothes and accessories — if there weren't something slightly funny in watching them chase their own tails, done up neatly and gasping for breath in Fashion's bright cellophane. Apparently they can't even see, through the wrapper, that economics today demands that all manufacturers es- tablish some sort of monopoly or continue to go 'round and 'round on the competitive merry-go-round. Year after year they stretch up their hands to catch the gold ring, miss it, fail, start over again. There are too many taxis on the streets of New York, so none of the drivers make money. There are too many people making hats, so some of them make no money. There are, as you may know, too many people manufacturing bags, and gloves, and dresses, so most of them don't make any money except by cutting corners, covering bad quality with more of Fashion's cellophane. It is hard, very hard for the manufacturer in the women's field to establish a monopoly. A few of them may succeed by ignoring Fashion completely and steadfastly continuing to make certain classic things, like Brooks Brothers' sweaters. For the rest, we may hope that when the designers of a machine age grow up, they will help. It seems to me that one day the manufacturers will realize that their businesses would be on much more solid ground if, instead of going in for one big free-for-all competition on price year in and year out, they would get something of their very own to sell. 332 They would have, of course, to shed the French Legend which leads them up back alleys. They would have to realize that they are producing things in masses for the mass of the American people. They would be forced to find out not what their competitors were doing so much as what some portion of the public wants. The individual manufacturer would then be in a position to stand on his feet and say, "Here it is, in a good quality at a fair price. It's something you want and need. Buy it be- cause it's right . . . not because it's green or blue, not be- cause Patou showed it last month, not because everyone in New York is wearing it, not because Vogue tells you it's chic. Buy it because you'll wear it with pleasure for several years." That will take designers, well-trained designers who un- derstand about machines and who know what's going on in the lives of the people. Of course, there won't be enough good designers to go around for all the thousands of clothing and accessory manufacturers in the women's field. But I just toss the idea off the top of my head to some brain trust: Why not make all those manufacturers try to get real designers? Wouldn't that be a handy way of cutting out all those unprofitable marginal businesses? What if the brain trust continued its work and tore down all Fashion's slogans? "All beautiful clothes are designed in the houses of the French couturiers and all women want them" — "Beautiful clothes change regularly every six months" — "All American women can have beautiful clothes." What would become of all the fashion writers if things didn't change every few months? They could relax and write about what pleased their fancy, things the public might well be told, what kind of velvet really wears, how much the life 333 of a chic European has to do with the girls who push type- writers all day every day, how perfectly awful some of those girls look in their satin dresses at nine A.M. The department stores could institute want slips, even for the public to fill out! They could stock good stable mer- chandise and hold it until it was cleared out two years later. They wouldn't have to worry about changing fashion, be- cause there wouldn't be any fashion, just style. And style only changes every seven years or so. Each department store could concentrate on what por- tion of the public it was going to cater to and in how many fields. The stores which couldn't make up their minds would just go out of business and that would be a big relief. Mrs. Jones would soon learn that at a certain store she was going to find the type of very un-trimmed clothes she liked and at a price she could afford. Mrs. Smith would go to some other store for her ruffles. After all, the butt of Fashion's dirtiest jokes is the public. The present American boast, that all women can be beauti- fully dressed if they choose, has been so clearly stated in so many ways for so long a time, that a large number of Ameri- can women believe themselves to be beautifully dressed who are actually horrors to behold. Take those $10.75 copies of the dresses worn by the Duchess of Windsor in the summer of 1937. You could tell by the look on the faces of the American girls who wore them that they really felt beguiling enough to snatch off a Duke because they had a modified silhouette corresponding to that of a Duchess. The actual dress, stinted on material, cheaply imitated as to print design, bad in color and ill-fitting, was a horror to behold. You may say, if the girl feels like a Duchess, what more do you ask? I say, she looks to me like the worst mass-pro- 334 duced imitation of a Duchess I can imagine, and it just isn't pretty. In their franker moments, the fashion promoters are quite apt to candidly admit that many American clothes are not beautiful at all but really awful. Upon asking the manu- facturer, fashion writer, retail promoter or buyer, who is re- sponsible, the answer comes back fast enough. Either "The public is fickle. It doesn't know what it wants," or, "The public gets what it wants. The public has bad taste." Fashion has taught his promoters how to pass the buck. Quite a lot of the public has good taste and cannot get what it wants. If the rest of the American public continues to have bad taste, I can scarcely see that it is their fault. The public taste in clothes is formed by what it is exposed to. If it is candidly admitted by fashion experts that the American public is exposed to a great many perfectly horrid clothes, why does this happen? How does it happen? To my mind the responsibility lies not with the public, but with all the branches of the fashion world. And, after observing the whole works for nine years, I can't see that most people are having any fun in the present set-up. The general public is worried all the time because it either can't get what it wants or can't afford what it wants or doesn't know what it wants. And the fashion world is wor- ried all the time either because it doesn't know what the pub- lic wants or can't make the public buy what it should want or is having to go into bankruptcy and start all over. About the only women who are having any fun dressing themselves are those who can afford couturiere prices and so get just what they want. Even some of them are unhappy because they are obsessed with the idea that they should be fashionable instead of just going their own way and being as stylish as the Queen Mother. 335 In any event, we couturieres may do our best to save our customers from the wiles of Fashion, from the latest French model, the newest imitation silk, the dress that is here today and gone tomorrow. With prosperity, we may flourish. With the next depression, we may die. We have very little to do with life in America. We can only dress our few. We, at the moment, are in the same rela- tion to life as the French couture, which has proven to be a great American press stunt, in relation to mass production. But whatever relation I, Elizabeth Hawes the couturiere, bear to life in America, I am really quite a happy girl. I at- tribute it all to the fact that, although I am engaged in the clothing business in America, where legends still flourish, where the public worries over whether its skirt is the pre- scribed length, and the manufacturer worries about how full the skirt is to be, where Fashion is God, I have fun because I am in business for my health, and what is more, I say: FASHION IS SPINACH. I know that some members of my trade agree with me and perhaps ultimately a majority of them may arrive at some such conclusion. Fashion may perish one day at the hands of its creators and promoters. If it doesn't pass out of existence in that way, I have a very firm belief something else will transpire. The American woman has been laboring under an excess of fashion for only a few decades. By and large she has shown herself able to cope with the exigencies of life as the need has arisen. When she felt the time had come to vote, she saw to it that she was permitted. Eventually she will look inside Fashion's bright cello- phane wrapper before she buys the contents. She will seri- 336 ously consider the quality and the usefulness of the very newest thing, the epitome of all chic, the height of all glamor. She will settle comfortably back in an old sweater and skirt and idly remark to ninety percent of what she gees: I SAY TO HELL WITH IT. continued from front flap on dress markups, and Miss Hawes' colleagues in trade are reported to be running up a little gold lame rope suitable for lynching purposes." — Lucius BEEBE, columnist "A book of real interest for every woman who buys clothes and every man who pays for them." — THERESA HELBURN, director, Theatre Guild "Any artist will rouse to Hawes' battle cry. I hate pla- giarism no matter where it exists, pirating designs or anything else. Hawes has said something for all of us." — MCCLELLAND BARCLAY, illustrator 1903. 1912. 1915. 1921. 1924. 1925. 1926. 1927. 1927. 1928. 1928. 1928. 1930. 1931. 1933. 1935. 1936. 1938. Elizabeth Hawes Born in Ridgewood, N. J. At the age of nine sewed her own clothes. At the age of twelve did her first professional dressmaking for a small shop. Entered Vassar. Liked economics. Outside of that, concentrated on clothes. At the end of the second year at Vassar went to Parsons School for Applied Arts. Summer as apprentice at Bergdorf Goodman. Graduated from Vassar and went to Paris to learn clothes designing. Became sketcher for prominent wholesaler and fashion reporter for the New Yorker. Became Paris stylist for R. H. Macy. Later — Became stylist for Lord & Taylor. April — Called at Paris Vogue office under Main Bocher. May — Took job as designer for Madame Groult. October — Opened shop in New York on 56th Street. First American designer to have an exhibition in Paris. Went into designing of accessories for whole- sale manufacturer, in addition to 56th Street Shop. Hawes, Inc., moved to present quarters at 21 East 67th Street. Invited to Russia to exhibit her clothes! First showing of Hawes' new designs for men's clothing. Fashion Is Spinach published. Jacket design by Alexey Brodovitch